We Provide Families With Food All Year Round, And It Doesn’t Cost Us A Penny
"He said that over the holidays he hadn’t eaten anything except sandwiches"
It was a Monday, the first day back after October half term, and the gas in the kitchens had failed. This meant we had to give the children salad and sandwiches for lunch.
During the afternoon, negative behaviour from a number of our most vulnerable children was brought to my attention. When talking to them, it became clear that their anger and frustration stemmed from the lack of a hot meal at lunchtime.
One child said he’d been looking forward to coming back to school and having a roast dinner. He said that over the holidays he hadn’t eaten anything except sandwiches and the occasional packet of crisps or dry cereal. When the child left my office I wrote the word ‘hunger’ on my office wall and vowed to do something to address this issue. A high percentage of children attend school each day without eating breakfast. Many factors contribute to this; poverty and unconscious neglect being the two most common.
An empty stomach affects concentration, energy levels, attentiveness and emotional wellbeing. Prolonged exposure to lack of food ultimately results in children working below age related expectations.
Traditional intervention models, designed to ‘close the gap’ and help children catch up are ineffective if the targeted pupils continue to present each day at school with empty stomachs. Hunger is a barrier to learning.
I committed to providing all children with a free breakfast every morning. I bought a toaster for every classroom and extended registration to include breakfast. I created a café in the school building which opens to the community every Monday and Wednesday. I opened a market stall at the school gates in order to provide the community with access to fresh fruit and veg on a weekly basis.
Here’s the smart bit: as a school we don’t pay a penny for the food that we use for these initiatives. Working in partnership with The Real Junk Food Project, I became aware of the vast amounts of food that goes to waste every day. All the food we provide is intercepted on its way to landfill from supermarkets, wholesalers and independent retailers. The budget at my school is just over £3 million. The building is new and cost around £11 million. What business with an annual budget of this scale and a facility of such value would close for 13 weeks of the year to its customers, leaving a skeleton staff of maintenance workers in charge? I created two 52-week positions in school and committed to provide families with access to support and food all year round.
The success of the work at my school inspired me to arrange a local awareness day where schools across Leeds were invited to take part in an event where breakfast was made available to any child in the city needing it. Ten thousand children signed up and received a breakfast consisting of food that would have otherwise been thrown away. Following this, Fuel For School was created.
It currently provides 55 schools across Leeds and Bradford with a weekly delivery of food, which is then used in a variety of ways; market stalls for the school community, ingredients for cooking activities, rewards for children, supplement breakfast clubs, even chicken food for a school farm. Six tonnes of food per week is saved from landfill as a result, and this will increase as more schools sign up. In addition to food deliveries, the programme also provides schools with an education resource that includes lesson plans and activities designed to improve wellbeing and mental health, cooking ideas, nutritional awareness, exercise plans and ideas on how to reduce food waste. Schools also receive a visit from Fred the Fox. Fuel for School delivers food to schools 52 weeks a year. These deliveries, coupled with the creativity of school leadership and access to school sites throughout the year, provides the ideal environment for ensuring children are nourished all year round.
Nathan Atkinson is headteacher of Richmond Hill Primary in Leeds and was shortlisted for the 2017 Varkey Foundation Global Teach Prize.
Find out more about Fuel for School at fuelforschool.info and @fuelforschool.
