Three-quarters of English secondary schools breach healthy food standards

A sweeping audit of nearly 400 English secondary schools has found that three-quarters of them are systematically violating government standards on what food they serve to students. The breaches, detailed in a report released Monday by Bite Back—a food charity founded by chef Jamie Oliver—paint a picture of widespread noncompliance that extends from breakfast through lunch, with schools offering everything from crisps and chocolate bars at morning break to burgers and fried foods far more frequently than rules permit.

The scale of the violations is difficult to ignore. At 206 schools, more than half the sample, students can purchase snacks that are supposed to be banned outright—crisps, Oreos, Mini Cheddars, chocolate bars, pastries—during breakfast and lunch periods. Government standards allow only nuts, seeds, plain vegetables, and plain fruit. Meanwhile, 224 schools, representing 57 percent of those studied, are serving meat products like burgers, nuggets, sausages, and goujons at least twice as often as the twice-weekly limit permits. Hash browns, classified as fried starchy foods and restricted to twice weekly, appeared on menus more frequently at 144 schools. A further 123 schools were using solid chocolate—chocolate chips, chocolate coatings—in desserts and baked goods, despite an outright ban.

D'Arcy Williams, Bite Back's chief executive, described the findings as alarming and said they exposed a system fundamentally failing children. The report arrives at a moment of particular significance: the Labour government is about to expand access to free school meals dramatically. Starting next month with the new academic year, all pupils from households receiving universal credit will qualify for free meals in England—a major policy shift that makes the question of what those meals actually contain suddenly more urgent.

Not all the news from the audit was grim. Only eight schools, or 2 percent, were selling confectionery like KitKats and Haribo sweets as standalone items, suggesting the ban on these products is largely holding. Just three schools were selling banned sugary drinks such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi. But these small victories do little to offset the broader pattern. Katharine Jenner, executive director of the Obesity Health Alliance, noted that children already grow up surrounded by unhealthy food in the wider food system—through marketing, shop promotions, and advertising. Schools, she argued, should be one place where that pressure lifts. Instead, the research suggests many are adding to it.

The government has acknowledged the problem. A Department for Education spokesperson said the department knows not every school is following standards, and promised what it called the most ambitious overhaul of school food in a generation. The response includes a strengthened enforcement regime and a requirement that every school publish its food policy and menus online, ostensibly to give parents visibility into what their children are eating. Whether these measures will actually change behavior remains to be seen. For now, the audit stands as evidence that the gap between what the rules say schools should do and what they actually do remains vast—and that gap widens precisely as the government is about to feed significantly more children through the school system.