Accessibility statement

The CONNECTS Food study is now in Stage 2 of the project. In 2021 we held eight workshops with children from our participating primary schools to find out from them what influences what they eat across the school day. This resulted in a ‘journey map’ which was used to inform discussions held in our systems mapping workshops. Eleven systems mapping workshops were held with 82 key stakeholders across the UK, including headteachers, teachers, caterers, school governors, parents and local authority representatives. From these discussions, we successfully developed our school food systems map, which includes 202 factors that influence what primary school children eat across the school day (e.g., motivations of the headteacher to implement a whole school approach in their school) across four key domains: Leadership and curriculum; child food preference; home environment; and school food environment (map to be published in due course).

The CONNECTS-Food study team are now busy designing our intervention, underpinned by our systems map, to support schools to implement whole school approaches to food. This intervention is being designed in partnership with our co-design team and partnership board and will incorporate existing resources and guidelines.

More details to follow in Spring/Summer 2022