16 Dec 2024 Guest blog: Improving food security for young people in Newham
In our latest blog, we hear from Jenny Martin, Assistant Public Health Strategist at Newham Council, about a three-year project engaging with young people about food insecurity.
Young people aged 11-19 are rarely the focus of discussions about food insecurity, with Newham’s high rates of child poverty and a significant proportion of secondary school children on free school meals, this represents a major concern. Our ‘We Are Food Secure 11-19’ project was set up to find ways to rethink the issue and consider new interventions particularly targeted at this age group at the time they are navigating the transition to independence.
Our three-year project was supported by the Health Foundation in partnership with the Local Government Association as part of the Shaping Places for Healthier Lives programme, which had a particular focus on system change.
As a result of early consultation with stakeholders and young people we focused on promoting food security in two domains where young people spend much of their time – at secondary school and in the Borough’s youth sector. For system change we needed to embed the principle of improved food security for young people in institutional policies in these locations. That includes supporting the development of leadership, governance, curricula, staff development and commissioning, as well as in improving food provision and catering arrangements.
Young people told us:
“If you eat something you like at school, it can help you feel happy and affect your mood for the rest of the day… not eating the right foods can make us feel tired and have low energy”
“There’s a need to offer food in more easily accessible places… we need access to healthy, nutritional and affordable food”
And wider stakeholders brought to our attention:
“The role of peer groups and life skills (for dealing with peer pressure, for example) can shape young people’s interactions with food”
We began in the secondary school environment. Engaging with nearly 30 of the borough’s secondary schools we undertook comprehensive mapping of existing practise (caterer type, free school meal provision, kitchen resources), and tested a range of smaller interventions responding to individual school needs with a focus on taking a whole school approach to food throughout. This included, for example, increasing free school meal registration rates, undertaking school food standards compliance audits, and supporting the development of forums for students to share their views on the food environment. We provided a central point of reference for the council’s various departments impacting on the issue and promoted initiatives such as food growing in the borough’s secondary schools.
In the youth sector we found a very different context, as young people attend these kinds of venues and clubs of their own volition, and food is not necessarily part of the main offer. Although there is high awareness of food insecurity in these settings, responses are less embedded in policy and standard practice and can vary quite a lot. We ran several workshops to find out what young people might find useful, and we are working to develop a similar kind of offer to that we developed for secondary schools.
As a result of the project, we have developed a vision that schools and youth clubs should be actively supported to become ‘food havens’ for this important age group. This means that when young people cross the threshold they should be ‘food secure’ in the fullest and most holistic sense. The food offer should be substantial enough, nutritious and appropriate. The offer needs to be reinforced holistically and supported by messages from adults working within the setting.
Improving food environments is not simply about providing the right ingredients, it is about system change.
There is commitment from Newham Council to continue this work including discussions around the public health team continuing to work to improve these spaces and access to nutritious food for young people as well as exploration of additional funding to further develop this work.
The project was a collaboration between Newham Council, AYPH and Cordis Bright, running from 2021-2024. On the project web page you will find a full range of outputs including an overall report, a report on our youth engagement underpinning the project, and five background briefings, along with other resources such as blogs and information about complex system approaches. For more information about school food in Newham, visit our webpage.
With a background in Community Nutrition, Jenny has worked in the food education and school food improvement sector for the last 10 years and more recently delivered the school-based intervention of the We Are Food Secure 11-19 project.
