Tools for Schools
On this page you can access our self-review tool to assess your current implementation of a whole school approach to food.
You can also develop your policy using our action planning tool, school food policy template and CONNECTS Food policy checklist
In England, the Government are considering mandating schools to consider their whole school approach to food policy and provide a statement of intent on their school website.
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Access our brief self-review tool to monitor your current level of implementation of a whole school approach to food and generate text to use on your school website. You can also use this tool to regularly monitor delivery of your whole school approach to food policy over time.
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Our FREE self-review tool takes minutes to complete and provides links to recommendations and resources to support you to develop your whole school approach to food policy.
Action Planning Tool
We recommend that as many people as possible are involved in completing this chart, including headteachers, senior leadership team, teachers, caterers, school governors and even children, to ensure that your plans are acceptable and feasible. We also recommend that you nominate at least one person to monitor progress of your whole school approach to food and that this is discussed regularly in team meetings.
In order to make a change to your school food system, we recommend that a range of activities are adopted, including some that are expected to achieve high impact. Using our ‘systems map’, we have estimated how much impact each activity might have. It's worth saying that not all of the activities that are most likely to make the biggest difference are the hardest to implement.
For example, there may be some simple solutions that can positively impact your food culture, such as swapping food rewards to other reward systems. A combination of activities will reinforce the impact that each activity has in order to optimise the impact of your whole school approach to food strategy.
Recommendations Reference Guide
Templates and checklists
CONNECTS-Food recommends the 'School Food Matters' template for building School Food Policies. To support your implementation of whole school approaches to food, we have also developed a simple checklist that schools can use to supplement the template.