Step 1. Conduct a lunch audit in your school
It is important to first record what your pupils are eating for lunch, whether it be a school meal or packed lunch. This will provide you with a ‘baseline’ from which to work, identify problem areas and evaluate progress. An audit can also be used to involve children and staff in the process, discuss what healthy choices are, and raise awareness of the children’s eating habits.
The idea is to get a representative ‘snapshot’ of the whole school. One day’s lunches is enough to do this, but obviously different classes or groups can be done on different days. Alternatively, if you are working with a particular year group or key stage as part of the curriculum, you can specify this in the audit and limit the audit to those classes.
There are several tools on this website for you to record the results of your audit. As they follow a similar structure, you can use a combination if you wish:
- Use the teacher’s online audit tool. Your entries will be recorded in a database so that you can easily access information, identify problem areas and compare results over time.
- Get the children to do their own lunch audit! - by using the Lunch-o-Matic Memory Master game in class. It’s easy and fun, and it allows class time discussion of broader healthy eating issues through the Eatwell Plate, and helps them strengthen ideas and develop confidence.
- Print out a packed lunch and school meal audit form to fill in at lunchtime.
Tips
- Try to make the audit as thorough and accurate as possible, although it is more important for it to be inclusive.
- Younger children might find if helpful to first use the lunchbox audit form before playing Lunch-o-Matic Memory Master.
- You can use the children’s lunchbox questionnaire to further explore children’s views on healthy food choices in relation to packed lunches.