The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently being debated in parliament, promises to roll out a free breakfast club in state-funded primary schools, but falls short of a commitment to universal, free primary school meals. This is a missed opportunity, not only for child wellbeing, but also for the government’s industrial and net zero strategies.
Currently, free school meals in England are available to all children in the first three years of primary school, but from then only for children from households with an annual income of less than £7,400 after benefits. This threshold means 900,000 children living in poverty are not eligible for a free school meal. One in five households with children are experiencing food insecurity. This is contributing to kids in the UK getting smaller and sicker.
The evidence on the benefits of school meals is clear: kids are more likely to attend and stay in school, their learning outcomes improve, socioeconomic disparities diminish, food insecurity is reduced, and low income families face less pressure on their budget. These reasons should, on their own, be sufficient for the UK government to follow Scotland, Wales and London in providing universal access to school meals.
What policymakers tend to miss is the potential of school meals to contribute to broader health, education, climate and economic priorities. Through well-structured public investments, school meals can become a catalyst for improving children’s health, engaging students in learning about food systems and nutrition, creating opportunities for UK-based industries to invest and grow, and making food systems more sustainable.
Realising this potential requires a whole-of-government, mission-oriented approach. Instead of the education ministry making siloed choices and determining that school meals can’t be afforded, the government could set the goal of ensuring that every child in the UK has access to healthy, sustainable, and tasty school meals as one of its missions. It could also task multiple ministries – Treasury, Business and Trade, Energy Security and Net Zero, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Health and Social Care, Education – with achieving this goal. It could learn from the London Borough of Camden: In 2020-21, I co-chaired the Camden Renewal Commission with MP Georgia Gould (then Leader of Camden Council) to define four missions that Camden has since translated into action. One of these missions is that “by 2030, everyone eats well every day with nutritious, affordable, sustainable food”.
Seen as part of a mission-oriented industrial strategy, investment in a school meals mission could contribute to the green growth agenda. The challenge of delivering healthy and sustainable meals could catalyse innovation and investment by businesses along the value chain – from agriculture and food production, to distribution – helping to create jobs, boost productivity and direct growth that is inclusive and sustainable.
Globally, food production and consumption systems are unsustainable, contributing to the climate crisis, deforestation, a global water crisis, and biodiversity loss. Public investments in school meals could be conditional on suppliers, for example, reducing food waste, eliminating plastic, cutting carbon emissions, committing to recycle water, and adopting sustainable land use practices.
A key vehicle for linking school meal, industrial and climate policies is public procurement. Procurement is a powerful demand-side lever for shaping mission-aligned markets and stimulating innovation, investment and production in line with mission goals. Procurement decisions are too often dominated by minimising cost and risk. This is true in spite of the UK’s Social Value Act, introduced in 2013 to enable a wider array of factors to be considered in procurement decisions.
The government’s forthcoming National Procurement Policy Statement will hopefully highlight the market-shaping potential of public procurement and prioritise alignment with the government’s missions with a view to maximising public value. However, while Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ autumn Budget referenced procurement as an important tool, it emphasised “value for money” and “reducing the costs for business and the public sector”. This focus on efficiency could limit investments in the public sector capabilities that are needed to make the best use of procurement.
A nation-wide school meals policy could include a strategic approach to procurement, with conditions set on sustainability, nutrition, labour practices, and local production. In Brazil, the National School Feeding Program requires that at least 30 per cent of the financial resources transferred to states and local governments for school meals is used to procure products sourced from local family farmers, with incentives for sustainable land use practices. Sustainable agribusiness value chains that contribute to food security are also a priority of Brazil’s mission-oriented industrial strategy, which I advised on.
In Sweden, procurement of healthy and sustainable school meals is part of a wider sustainable food production strategy and committing to having a carbon neutral welfare state – requiring innovation in all the services government provides from sustainable mobility to the lunch in public schools. Through its National Food Strategy, the Swedish government has sought to align social, economic and environmental priorities, to realise the full potential of its food supply chain.
Budget constraints are not a good reason for withholding a commitment to nationwide school meals. Spending on school meals should be seen as an investment. This is both in terms of the value provided to the people – better and healthier lives – but also due to the way that mission-oriented investments can produce a multiplier effect – leading to higher investments (for the mission to be accomplished) and thus much greater impact on GDP than the original public investment. In a low-investment economy, like the UK, this is critical for achieving directed growth – growth that makes the society more inclusive and sustainable.
A national school meals policy would be a winning strategy on multiple fronts. It has the potential to feed children and improve their health, education and life outcomes, and to catalyse innovation and investment across sectors leading to gains in productivity, jobs and growth, as well as the transformation of food systems in line with climate and biodiversity goals.
Mariana Mazzucato is a professor at University College London and author of “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism“andco-author of “The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies“
The School Food Review is a coalition of organisations spanning charities, educational organisations, caterers, unions and academics, committed to working together to improve children’s health by reforming the school food system. For more information visit our website.
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