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Summary 145

One-on-One-Communications
Poor communications among caterers, school cooks, and head teachers came
out strongly in the research. Meetings in the intervention schools were set up
among the three parties to define roles and responsibilities, to help head teach-
ers and school cooks understand what services were available from the caterers,
and to look at developing bespoke menus for their schools.

Online Communications
Head teachers often report they are time poor and the amount of paperwork
they receive is high, so the print materials were backed up with e-newsletters and
new sections on the caterer’s Web sites, designed specifically for head teachers,
carrying some of the myth busters and case studies from the local area.

S UMM A RY

Social marketing is about increasing long-term, sustainable behavioral change;
therefore, evaluation is ongoing and pilot sites are being run on a long-term basis.
Nevertheless, results from the initial pilots and pre-testing work are positive. In
particular, adopting a multipronged approach is vital because school meal uptake
is a complex issue.
This project’s ultimate goal was to increase the number of children eating
school meals. As with many social marketing projects, the interventions were not
delivered in a controlled environment. School meals are high on the political
agenda in England, and therefore, there are numerous local and national initiatives
going on at the same time. This means that we cannot say for sure if the positive
changes that were recorded were solely due to the interventions described in this
chapter. The results presented here are also just from phase 1 of the project and
from a small number of schools where the initial testing and piloting work was
conducted. However, in the schools that received the intervention mix, school meal
uptake increased. The increases ranged from 3.5% to 9%, depending on which in-
tervention mix the schools received. During phase 2, the local team will investigate
which intervention mix was the most effective, as it is currently unclear which in-
tervention was the most effective.
Other measures were also used to evaluate the interventions. Other indicators
included:

• Environmental factors, including packaging and food wastage.
• Head teachers’ satisfaction with the communications between caterers and
themselves.