20 October 2025
For almost 20 years, Food for Life has been working with schools across the country to build a strong, healthy food culture that reaches every part of school life. We support schools to serve great food, teach children where it comes from, and build practical skills through cooking and growing.
The school environment has changed a lot in recent years, bringing with it a growing range of challenges. With reduced funding and fewer staff, schools are facing growing challenges that make it harder to prioritise food education and healthy eating. Our on-the-ground teams have been working directly with schools, listening to their challenges to better understand the barriers they face and improve our programmes to meet their needs.
We know budgets are tight, so we’ve removed the need for schools to spend extra money to achieve the first level of our award. Now, any school can reach a Bronze Awards using the resources that they already have available within their school.
Many schools told us that requiring a caterer with Food for Life Served Here accreditation was a major barrier to achieving a Bronze Award. For a lot of schools, especially those within multi-academy trusts, they have little to no control over their catering supplier. With our newly evolved School Awards, this is no longer a requirement. Instead, the Bronze Award now helps schools to find out more about their catering arrangements, understand how healthy and sustainable their meals are, and take positive steps to improve them where possible.
In addition, we have restructured the award pathway to make it clearer for schools to move from Foundation through to Bronze, Silver, and Gold. We’ve also added practical resources and templates to make it easier for schools to work through each stage.
We have already received fantastic feedback from schools about these changes. One teacher told us:
“The changes to the new framework were a huge help. Its structure felt more flexible and better aligned with our school’s existing projects and ongoing curriculum.”
We hope the improvements we’ve made this year will make it easier for even more schools to put good food at the heart of school life.