Page 169 - Social Marketing for Public Health Global Trends and Success Stories

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142 CHAPTER 6 ■ Increasing School Meal Uptake in a Deprived Region in England

• Children to eat a nutritionally balanced meal.
• Head teachers to promote school meals to parents and children and
become engaged in the agenda.
• Head teachers to understand the nutritional standards, incorporating
what can and cannot be served in foods since the new standards have
come in.
• The augmented product includes:
• A laminated myth-busting card and case study compendium that
highlight local successful initiatives and overcome the misconceptions
with the new school meal standards (saying what the children can still
eat—e.g., chicken nuggets, etc.).
• A new dining room experience, created by queue management,
lunchtime rotation, and improved 1:1 management by the dinner
nannies.
• 1:1 meetings between head teachers and caterers to develop new menus
for their individual schools based on their children’s favorite meals.
• Development of new menus for individual school meal tastes.
• Puddings served in bowls and at the table so they are hot and do not
run over into their savory main course.
• A “healthy tuck shop,” where the children help cook the healthy snack
food (such as banana bread, etc.), thus learning about food and
cooking skills.
• Development of the single-choice menu.
• Training for dinner nannies and kitchen assistants on customer service
skills, presentation of food, first aid, nutrition standards, and positive
behavioral management/motivational techniques. Due to a low average
reading age and lack of formal educational qualification of the dinner
nannies, the training is being developed with the health literacy team at
the Department of Health in England and will also be accredited.

Price

The research showed that price is a major factor in school meal uptake. Recent
increases in food costs are seen as a threat to current school meal pricing and
could lead to detrimental, but unavoidable, price increases.

Monetary

Cost was also a factor for many of the families, who had more than one child but
who did not satisfy the criteria for free school meals. Cost was also a factor for
the caterers as they were experiencing rising food, fuel, and labor costs.