Post-war food policies ‘cast new light’ on free school meals, researchers find

At the launch of its new Children’s Food Policy Library, which documents the historical changes in government legislation to childhood nutrition and poverty dating back 140 years, Anna Taylor, executive director of The Food Foundation, said that it “casts new light on today’s policy decisions” and reiterates the “urgent” need to extend free school meals to preserve children’s long term health.

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The archive, which lists acts of parliament, research studies and more than 180 key policy developments aimed at improving children’s nutrition since 1879, provides a "stark record" of how Britain’s current generation of older adults benefitted from a wartime and post-war drive to improve childhood nutrition regardless of social class and income. 

In the late 1940s after the Second World War, free school meals and school milk were made available to all school children. The Welfare Food Scheme, introduced in 1940, also distributed milk and other nutritious foods such as free cod liver oil and orange juice to all children aged under five.

Recent initiatives include the reintroduction of school cookery classes in 2014, the advent of the Holiday Activities and Food Programme to support low-income children in accessing nutritious food during the school holidays, and the introduction of the School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme which provides free fruit and vegetable snacks.

But the database shows an "overall trend" towards more piecemeal nutritional support for more recent generations of children from both Conservative and Labour governments, with the "loss of all the universal nutritional schemes which existed in the 1940s and 1950s".

Taylor said: "This new library shows the evolution of children's food policies and casts new light on today’s policy decisions. For example, it shows that free school meals were first introduced when we realised that poor nutrition in childhood meant that our soldiers didn't have the physical strength to fight in the Boer war.  It shows that in 1949 and in 1986 free school meals were cut back so that many of today's older adults who benefited from free school meals as children would no longer be eligible now.  

"Poor nutrition in childhood has once again become a national priority - with unhealthy weight and poor diets affecting more than one in three 11-year-olds.  It's time to rethink whether we have the right policies in place and urgently extend free school meals to prevent the long-term impact of the cost-of-living crisis on children's health."

The Food Foundation’s Children’s Right2Food Dashboard, launched alongside the library, provides a comprehensive picture of children’s food across England, focusing on dietary and health inequalities.

It includes eligibility and uptake of government schemes, such as free school meals, what children eat and the impact of diet-related health outcomes. It includes trends over time, as well as showing how children’s health is linked to regional location, social deprivation and ethnic group.

A spokesman for the Nuffield Foundation, which funded the library, said: "This new resource provides an extremely valuable window on the past and the progressive decisions that contributed to better health for previous generations.” 

Both the Children’s Food Policy Library and the Children’s Right2Food Dashboard are freely available to policy makers, researchers and the general public.