Five years of Impact in Early Years
Significant strides have been made in early years nutrition through collaborative efforts between early years settings, the States Early Years Team and our Eat Well team. Over the past five years, our joint initiative has led to the roll out of the Eat Well policy across all nurseries and pre-schools, and we are seeing a positive impact on thousands of children's nutrition and health.
The Eat Well policy establishes a comprehensive “whole-setting” approach to nutrition within nurseries and pre-schools. The policy was developed in collaboration with the sector and the States Early Years Team and since then we have seen it lead to improvements in practice and approaches on the ground.
Our work has included a number of actions such as providing recommendations for menus, carrying out practitioner training and parent engagement sessions and distributing resources for settings to carry out healthy eating initiatives such as the Growing Gang and the Lunchbox Lowdown.
Our recent lunch box survey, which was carried out to find out what changes have taken place since our first survey in 2018, highlight positive changes in children’s nutrition, including an increase in veg being offered in lunchboxes.
These findings underline the positive impact of the Eat Well policy and the sector’s ongoing commitment to improving children’s health and nutrition. However, they do indicate that further positive change is required to our wider food system such as food retail, the out of home eating sector and marketing of unhealthy food, which can have an impact on children’s eating habits and influence lunch box contents.
We’ve seen a huge improvement in menus with lots of reflection regarding the balance of food groups offered. Some practitioners are involving children in preparing snacks. As a result lots of children are eating more variety of foods in Early Years settings and also at home because this has been fed back to parents. The positive impact has been really strong across the board.
We commend the dedication and hard work of early years professionals, who have made great strides over the last few years in fostering healthier eating habits among young children. The impact of their work is evident from the lunch box findings. This change can only happen by working alongside parents and carers, who have the tricky “job” each day to feed their children healthily but hopefully feel more supported in doing so by the positive changes the sector has made.
To find out more about our work in the early years visit Mini Munch
For more information and support, contact Caroline Hoar or Alex Kosmas