The School Food Standards Compliance Pilot: A Yorkshire Based Case Study

School meals provide the opportunity to address the dietary health of children on a population scale. However, compliance with the mandatory School Food Standards (SFS), which regulate the food to be provided to children at school, is not currently routinely monitored. Therefore, differences may exist between what food is mandated and what is offered to, and consumed by, children meaning that school food may not be optimised to influence dietary health.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Department for Education conducted a pilot study in 2022-2023 in which they explored whether Food Safety Officers (FSOs) could incorporate checks for potential non-compliance with SFS in their exisiting visitis to schools and identify issues for follow up. The study concluded that FSOs could incorporate SFS compliance checks within their existing programme and that issues of non-compliance were able to be identified. However, it was noted by participants that the limited scope of the checks in this pilot, through the use of three rotating question sets, may not be sufficient to reflect compliance if the scheme was to be extended for this purpose.

This study explored the efficacy of the FSA compliance pilot test question sets to assess adherence to SFS applicable to lunch time servings, in the context of 18 menu cycles and 11 datasets of consumption in Yorkshire primary schools.