Over the last six months we have taken a design-led approach to understanding ways of engaging and sharing information with parents and pupils about free school meals that could encourage more families to take up this offer. We worked with four schools across Cardiff, Caerphilly and Torfaen, running 16 workshops with 57 parents and 80 primary school pupils.
In September 2022, the Welsh Government began the rollout of a national policy to provide a free healthy school meal to all Welsh primary school pupils by the end of the 2024 academic year. With this move, Wales joins a group of only a few countries with a universal free school meal policy for primary school children. Although we might expect that every pupil would accept their free lunch entitlement, many do not. For example, while data for take-up of universal primary free school meals (UPFSM) have not yet been published in Wales, latest figures for Scotland indicate that, of the 300,000 primary school children entitled to free school meals, uptake is at approximately 62%. Not only do free school meals represent an opportunity for families to save money on their weekly food shop, several studies have suggested that on average they are considerably more healthy than packed lunches. Consequently, increasing uptake of free school meals represents a valuable opportunity to improve the health of children’s diets.
