How Managed Learning Environments can support and enhance school healthy eating programmes
28 January 2008
Healthy living and eating have become buzzwords in both schools and on the street. It’s virtually impossible to open a magazine, visit a supermarket or even switch on the television without being immersed in new healthy eating products, exercise regimes, government campaigns and initiatives, all aimed at improving our health and our attitudes towards it. Popular TV programmes such as “You Are What You Eat” and “Cook Yourself Thin vs Celebrity Recipes” have jumped on the bandwagon of our national obsession with healthy eating and helped open our eyes to a whole new world of responsibilities and education.
Young people and schools have been at the heart of this media and governmental focus on healthy eating. In 2006, Jamie Oliver’s high-profile national campaign based around his TV series “Jamie’s School Dinners”, led to a huge series of related government initiatives with funding and firmly placed healthy eating on the school agenda – both in terms of school dinners and awareness of food and nutrition. One of the five key aims of ‘Every Child Matters’ is for every child to “be healthy”, putting children\'s and young people\'s health firmly in the spotlight and encouraging schools to take responsibility not only for their school dinners but also for educating students on their nutritional intake and lifestyles.
In 2004, the public health white paper ‘Choosing Health’ set a challenging target for 75% of schools to have achieved healthy schools status by 2009. With the deadline fast approaching, many secondary schools are already promoting healthy eating educational programmes in their schools and many a school canteen has been emptied of its turkey twizzlers…
So with nutrition already a key part of school agendas, what else could schools be doing to promote healthy eating and achieving the aim of Every Child Matters? Is a school’s role regarding healthy eating just about providing good, healthy food in the canteen and teaching about its benefits? Or is it time to start looking at the wider picture, encouraging schools make the most of other resources, especially ICT, to create a sustainable and linked up programme of education and advice – for both parents and children alike?
As the government’s Building Schools for the Future initiative extends into its 3rd year and school ICT becomes increasingly advanced, most secondary schools have turned to cashless catering in their canteens. Students pay for their food on a smart card which not only registers payment, but also details of the purchase. Currently, this information often falls into a black hole. Already being trialled as part of the BSF programme, schools can now use their Managed Learning Environment (MLE) to integrate and publish information from catering management systems and share it with parents, teachers, governors and students – therefore opening up a whole new realm of opportunities for educating students about healthy eating. Not just a numbers game, the MLE can extract detailed nutritional statistics on pupil meal purchases which can be broken down into salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, vegetable and fruit intake – available on an individual or whole school level.
As this technology becomes available, it is crucial that schools make the most out of it in order to advise and educate both pupils and parents on the importance of nutritional intake. It is a well recognised point of view that if a child eats poorly there is likely to be a negative impact on learning. By recording nutritional intakes and sharing them with students through an MLE, schools can provide a comprehensive and highly relevant education on the benefits of eating properly. Lessons on healthy eating need no longer rely on statistics from websites but can be based around real life students in a real life school situation.
Access to this kind of information is instrumental in helping students take responsibility for their own diets and in encouraging them to think about the correlation between what they are eating and their performance in school, both mental and physical. There is a huge educational benefit to exposing students to consistent nutritional messaging, encouraging them to take an interest in what they eat and highlighting the importance of a good, well balanced diet. Ready meals in supermarkets now rarely come without some kind of nutritional guide and with the right technology now in place, there is no reason for the content of school meals not to be demystified and labelled in a similar, useful way.
Giving students access to their own nutritional information is key if we are to instil the importance of healthy eating into them. Fundamentally, education is not just about subject based learning in a classroom; it is about setting young people up for life. Eating and living healthily is an integral part of life and the more that schools can do to encourage and promote students’ interest in nutrition, the better lives our students will have in the future.
