School Meals Need Urgent Food Standards Improvement, Say Campaigners

A film featuring young food campaigners and actor Dame Emma Thompson is calling for urgent action to improve the nutritional quality of school food in 2026, with supporter Jamie Oliver claiming school meals – “the UK’s biggest and most important restaurant chain” – are failing too many customers. 

Image: The Food Foundation

Titled The Lunch They Deserve, the film urges government to help raise food standards in schools, with campaigners arguing that school dinners should nourish children – not just fill them up. 

Created by multi-Bafta winning animators The Tin Bear Project, the film supports The Food Foundation’s existing campaign for healthier school meals.

The organisation claims 4.5 million children in the UK are growing up in poverty, while a healthy diet is unaffordable for many. 

School meals, however, have the potential to ensure these young people have access to a nutritious, hot meal that will help to keep them healthy, the Food Foundation explained in a news release.

Dame Emma Thompson, Actor and Food Foundation Celebrity Ambassador, who narrates the film, said school lunchtime represents a “golden opportunity”.

“Every child has the right to healthy food,” Thompson stated. “Let’s get it right in all our schools. Let’s give all our kids the lunch they deserve so that they can thrive.” 

Chef and school food champion Jamie Oliver, who is also supporting the campaign, said all the evidence shows that good school food transforms children’s health, learning, attendance, and wellbeing. 

“School meals are the UK’s biggest and most important restaurant chain, and it’s failing too many of its customers,” Oliver lamented. “It’s long past time for government to properly update 20-year-old standards and actually enforce them."

An Opportunity For New Standards

With the government committed to expanding the free school meals scheme from September 2026, the new school year is a huge opportunity to mark a step change in both access to Free School Meals and the quality of the meals served, according to Food Foundation Executive Director Anna Taylor.

"Monitoring has to go hand in hand with new standards so that schools which aren’t meeting standards can be given adequate support to improve,” Taylor explained. 

Despite many positive examples of schools delivering fantastic food to children, Taylor said there needs to be less of a postcode lottery to ensure all children benefit. 

“We've seen clear evidence that when school food standards have been updated in the past, the uptake of school meals has increased steadily over the following years,” she pointed out. “We now have the opportunity to make sure this goes further so that every child can enjoy a nutritious meal at lunchtime.” 

The Lunch They Deserve film features the voices of four young people from across the UK with lived experience of food insecurity.

These 'Food Ambassadors' are calling for every child to have access to nutritious meals that support growth, learning, and emotional wellbeing, particularly considering that they represent the only reliable meal of the day for some children.