Campaign film calls for school food improvement

The Food Foundation is launching a powerful animated campaign film narrated by Dame Emma Thompson and four young people with lived experience of food insecurity. 

The film, ‘The Lunch They Deserve’, seeks to focus the nation on the need for better school food standards: there are currently 4.5 million children growing up in poverty in the UK and for many of them a healthy diet is unaffordable. School meals have the potential to ensure these young people have access to a nutritious, hot meal that will help to keep them healthy.  

Dame Emma Thompson, Actor and Food Foundation Celebrity Ambassador said: “School lunchtime is the golden opportunity for society to step up, to serve great food to our young people and by doing so support families, the NHS and our communities. Every child has the right to healthy food. Let’s get it right in all our schools. Let’s give all our kids the lunch they deserve so that they can thrive.” 

Jamie Oliver, Chef and School Food Campaigner said: “We’ve had the evidence for years - good school food transforms children’s health, learning, attendance and wellbeing. Yet we still have a system where some children eat well at school and others don’t. That’s outrageous. School meals are the UK’s biggest and most important restaurant chain, and it’s failing too many of its customers. It’s long past time for government to properly update 20-year-old standards and actually enforce them.” 

Last year the government announced that from September 2026 the provision of Free School Meals will be extended to all children from households in receipt of Universal Credit. The government also pledged to improve school food standards, with Keir Starmer again publicly affirming his commitment to quality school food at an event at Number 10 Downing Street in November.  

Campaigners are now joining The Food Foundation’s call for further bold action from government that will create a turning point in school food standards, and consequently in child health, in 2026 alongside the expansion of free school meals.

Mandatory school food standards do currently exist, but they do not take into account recent nutritional recommendations. Another key problem is that compliance with the standards is not monitored, so no one is checking the food schools are providing to our children. 

Free School Meals are one of the most powerful tools available to protect children from food insecurity, give some relief to families that are struggling with the rising cost of food, and address health inequalities across the UK. As Free School Meals are rolled out to more vulnerable children, standards must also be updated and properly monitored to improve child health and educational outcomes. 

Children from the lowest income households suffer the most from diet related ill health, and are on average shorter. We know that currently in the UK fewer than 10% of teenagers eat enough fruit and vegetables, over a third of children are living with overweight or obesity by the age of 11 and young people’s risk of type 2 diabetes has increased by 22% in the last five years. The video makes the point that this is very much a disease of modern times created by the food we are giving to our children.  Tooth decay, linked to sugar consumption, also stands as the leading cause of hospital admissions for children. 

Anna Taylor, Executive Director, The Food Foundation, said: “September 2026 is a huge opportunity to mark a step change in both access to free school meals and the quality of the meals served. Monitoring has to go hand in hand with new standards so that schools which aren’t meeting standards can be given adequate support to improve.  There are lots of wonderful examples of schools delivering fantastic food to children – that experience needs to be less of a postcode lottery and instead something which all children can benefit from.  We’ve seen clear evidence that when school food standards have been updated in the past, the uptake of school meals has increased steadily over the following years. We now have the opportunity to make sure this goes further so that every child can enjoy a nutritious meal at lunchtime.” 

The film was created by multi-Bafta winning animators The Tin Bear Project and funded by Trust for London and The National Lottery Community Fund.