Impact
Here, you will find details of some of the ways in which the School Meals Project aims to make a positive and lasting impact: with our partner schools, our community partners, charity organisations and with policy makers.
Wednesday 13th June and Wednesday 26th June 2024, Creative Activities Outreach Sessions, Batley.
In June, Ellen from Strand 3 and Isabelle from Strand 2 designed and delivered two creative oral history sessions with Year Six pupils of our partner school in Batley. The first session introduced pupils to the project and a brief history of the School Meals Service, before inviting them to design their own school meals of the imagined past and future. We then conducted an oral history training session, equipping pupils with the skills they needed to undertake interviews in our second session. Returning on Wednesday 26th June, the pupils prepared interview questions and put them to the test by interviewing the school’s past pupils. Our insights from this session will be presented in a workshop at the Oral History Association conference in Cincinnati later this year, as well as in a forthcoming article. Huge thanks to our partner school for supporting these sessions and to the enthusiastic and engaging pupils who made the sessions such a joy to deliver.
IOE Insights Podcast
The history of free school meals: how its past dishes out lessons for future servings | Research for the Real World- with Gary McCulloch
This podcast hears about the impact of the UK’s School Meals Service on schools and their communities since its inception in 1906, and how it can adapt to the challenges of food insecurity and the impact of the economic crisis on children’s learning.
Research for the Real World is an IOE Podcast series featuring conversations about education and social science research and its impact on policy, practice and our everyday lives.
Listen below or use the following link to access the podcast via your usual podcast platform: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/jan/history-free-school-meals-how-its-past-dishes-out-lessons-future-servings-rftrw-s21e03
The British Food History Podcast
S06E09 The School Meals Service with Heather Ellis (August 2023)
The School Meals Service with Heather Ellis – The British Food History Podcast | Podcast on Spotify
Neil’s guest on this edition of The British Food History Podcast is Heather Ellis from Sheffield University. Heather is a historian of Education and she, along with academics from the University of Wolverhampton and UCL, have just embarked on an ambitious project looking at people’s experiences and memories of their school dinners in all four UK Home Nations. School dinners have been supplied by the School Meals Service – i.e. by the Government – since 1908. They talked about the project, the origins of the School Meals Service in the first decade of the 20th century, the foods served up over the next 100 years or so. The School Meals Project wants your food memories if you have had experience with school meals in the UK, however old you may be and whatever the interaction may be.
Breaking Britain: A Podcast about the Politics of a Disunited Kingdom
The Politics of School Meals: Food, Community and the British Welfare State – With Heather Ellis (March 2023)