Food Standards Agency UK School Activity: Core Principles

Wednesday 19 December 2007

The Food Standards Agency's (FSA) activity reflects our vision for 'safe food and healthy eating for all'. Our schools work contributes towards this and aspires to 'help young people to choose, cook and eat safe healthy food'.

A united¹ approach across the FSA ensures that our target audiences of children and young people along with teachers, school support staff, Governors (where appropriate) and parents/carers can identify, access and utilise our evidence based activity and resources.

We believe this will help us to support other Government interests across the 4 UK countries and other key partners to help encourage schools to adopt a whole school approach to food and nutrition. It is our intention to work within an umbrella of shared principles to which all our schools activity will aspire.

Our aims in developing our role in schools are to ensure that we are:

• practical and our activity reflects the FSA’s food competency areas of diet and health; consumer awareness; cooking (food preparation and handling) and food safety – as appropriate for the age group
• robust, so that information to schools on diet and health is up-to-date and based upon scientific evidence and research
• school focused to help the whole school community, including school caterers² adopt correct food hygiene and safety practices and use healthier approaches to choose, prepare and cook food
• open and keen to enter into a dialogue with children, young people and the whole school community (including reaching out into families) to help them make informed and healthier choices when purchasing, preparing and eating food and drink
• consistent in making certain that schools receive relevant and coherent messages through joined up thinking with our Government and non-Governmental partners

To meet our aims we will ensure that our specific activities and resources include and deliver, where appropriate:

• a curriculum map
• lesson plans with teaching objectives
• extension activity suggestions
• flexibility for use in all 4 UK countries
• proposed learning outcomes
• flexibility for use with different abilities
• resources for target age group
• timings, where relevant, for using the resources

FSA schools work will share a common identity across the UK to provide a consistent brand, which teachers and schools will be able to recognise. Key components for developing our marketing and communication approach to schools include:

• developing a consistent look and feel to resources
• continuing to work with a broad range of partners to get our messages into schools
• engaging with organisations who are better placed to communicate with the wider school community
• developing a focus point for school resources on food.gov.uk
• developing a postcard series to market our schools activity and resources

The intention is to implement these principles across our resources and activity. This will involve a review of the FSA’s existing resources and activity to assess them against the principles and to identify how to update those deemed still to have a role in schools.

When developing new resources and activity the cross FSA schools group will work to deliver the principles outlined in this document.

The cross FSA schools group will encourage a 'joined up' approach to the FSA's schools work and will subsequently revisit and refine this approach as FSA activity develops.

¹ The FSA Schools Group includes representation across the UK including colleagues in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and policy divisions of Communications, Food Allergy, Food Hygiene/Safety and Nutrition
² FSA ,working with key partners, continues to develop training materials and qualifications suited for UK wide school catering and support staff