As part of our work towards the overall goal of improving access to healthier food and drink we recognise there is a specific opportunity to support those delivering healthy primary school meals in Wales. Given the current roll-out of free school meals for all primary school children, we are interested in testing new approaches to ensure children benefit as much as possible from these meals.

We know there are already existing examples of great school meal delivery across the Welsh school food system and we want to celebrate and learn more about these, as well as identify opportunities to share their learnings more widely. 

This project is building on insights from ongoing Nesta work in Wales which is focussed on engaging and sharing information with parents and pupils about free school meals that could encourage more families to take up this offer. However,  we will focus on how food is situated within the school food system, specifically how menus are designed and how food is served to pupils.

These are all things that our previous work has suggested have an impact on decisions about whether a child eats a school meal, but are also important in ensuring that those that do take up the offer of a school meal eat as healthy a meal as possible.  

We want to discover examples of great work being done in Wales and internationally on school meal delivery to identify potential ways to share and scale best practice. Our aim is to understand the potential benefits and challenges of these practices being scaled across Wales - and to identify ways in which we can achieve wider scaling, in partnership with Welsh Government, councils and other stakeholders.

The findings from this project will primarily be used to inform future work in this area for Nesta, including how and what resources we should invest in helping to support catering teams to scale good practice across Wales.

Through a combination of reviewing the existing literature on school food policy in Wales, academic research and existing programmes, alongside deep dives and conversations with stakeholders involved in school food delivery in Wales and beyond, this project will aim to understand:

• the opportunities in creating a shared vision of good practice across the Welsh school food system, taking into account the commonalities and differences in stakeholders' perspectives
• what different stakeholders recognise as examples of successes and challenges in the school meal system, with a specific focus on ensuring pupils have sufficient choice and variety alongside a meal that is always of high quality
• what levers​ there are for implementing and scaling best practices across Wales, and the role that monitoring can play in ensuring these opportunities are realised.

After an open tender for experienced teams and individuals across the UK including Wales, we identified the independent food policy and practice consultancy Bremner and Co as the most suitable and have appointed them as residents for this project.