9 School food provision partnerships for child health:insights from the ActEarly FIGS study

This paper focuses on the central role of partnerships in public programmes seeking to address child health inequalities, which have increased with the UK’s cost-of-living crisis, leaving millions of UK children vulnerable to food insecurity. In Tower Hamlets, a diverse London borough where over half of children experience poverty, child-centred initiatives like universal provision of free school meals are crucial. Although offered to all primary school children in the borough, not all families take up this offer. More research is needed to understand why and the potential impact this might have on widening pre-existing health inequalities. Our Food Improvement Goals in Schools (FIGS) study is a focused ethnography exploring school-based food provision in ten primary schools in Tower Hamlets. It evaluates a new council initiative ‘Fantastic Food in Schools’ designed to improve and increase uptake of free school meals and promote whole school approaches to healthy food. FIGS sits within the UKPRP funded ActEarly programme, aiming to tackle child health inequalities through upstream interventions. Beyond empirical findings, in this paper we reflect on the essential collaborative groundwork that enriches this project through the lens of knowledge encounters. Knowledge encounters represent inclusive interactions reflecting different sources and forms of knowledges in a partnership. We highlight how relational dynamics in our case are based on flexibility and commitment to make use of a shared pool of ‘insider-on-the-ground experience’ with ‘outsider-conceptual-evidence-based’ knowledges which permeate and enrich how we navigate various spaces. We argue these encounters are instrumental for research aimed at informing policy and practice, whilst ensuring that qualitative insights resonate with the communities we aim to serve. This work is timely in light of the Mayor of London’s recent extension of the universal free school meal offer to all primary school children across the city.