Packed Lunch and Drinks Guidance

Rationale

Waycroft Academy is dedicated to providing an environment that promotes healthy eating and enables pupils to make informed choices about what they eat. It is essential that nutritional education is embedded in the curriculum and that there is consistency across subjects including Science, Technology, PSHE and PE.

Aims

• To enable pupils to make healthy food choices through the provision of information and development of appropriate skills and attitudes.
• To provide healthy food/drink options throughout the school day and ensure that food brought into school is healthy too.
• To ensure that all aspects of food and drink in school promote the health and well-being of pupils, staff and visitors to our school.

Food and drink provision throughout the school day

Drinks

Water fountains are provided for children in years 3 – 6. Children are encouraged to bring a water bottle to keep in the classroom so that they can drink water regularly. Sinks are available for children to use to top up their bottle throughout the day. Squash and other drinks are not permitted (unless a medical need has been communicated with the school).

Break times

EYFS and Key Stage 1 children have access to a piece of fruit through the National Fruit scheme. Key Stage 2 children are allowed to eat a snack during the morning break; this can be fruit, dried fruit, bread sticks, tomatoes etc but not crisps, biscuits, chocolate or sweets.

Lunch times

An external catering company provides our school dinners and these meals meet the National Nutritional Standards for school lunches. Free school meals are provided for those who are entitled.

Packed lunches

Waycroft encourages parents and carers to provide children with packed lunches that complement the nutritional standards. The ‘School Food Standards 2023’ state that confectionary, chocolate (including chocolate covered products) should be avoided throughout the whole school day. Therefore, we actively discourage parents from putting foods that are high in salt, fat and sugar content in lunchboxes. As long as it is in balance with other food types, we do allow children to have a small biscuit-based bar e.g. Penguin, Kit-Kat, Club etc. If we think that a child has an excessive amount of such foods, for their age, then he/she will be asked to put some back in their bag to take home at the end of the day.

Nuts and Seeds

Due to allergies of children and staff, we are a ‘nut-aware’ school. Please do not provide any items in your child’s packed lunch which contain nuts e.g. Nutella/Kinder products, nuts/seeds as snacks etc.