Serving Up Standards; An Institutional Ethnography of School Food Work in UK Primary Schools

School meals in the UK carry a significant weight of responsibility for improving the health and wellbeing of children through the provision of a well-balanced nutritious meal. There is a complex policy and legislative framework surrounding school food that is designed to ensure that these benefits are realised, especially for the most vulnerable children through the provision of free school meals. Despite this, school meals services struggle to compete with packed lunches brought in from home, with a significant proportion of children who are entitled to a free meal not taking up this option. An Institutional Ethnography (IE) of school food work was carried out to explore the problem of low meal uptake from the perspective of school food workers in three Sheffield primary schools. IE is a feminist qualitative research approach that explores how work takes place in institutional contexts, mapping how institutional power shapes practice. This research offers an alternative framing of school food as a practice that is struggling to compete with the norms and expectations set by the dominant food industry, in particular the predominance of heavily marketed processed and unhealthy foods and the expectation of choice. The accounts of frontline workers identified powerful dietary norms as a significant barrier to school mean uptake, with many families and children finding school meals unfamiliar and unappealing because they did not resemble the food that they were used to eating. Policy expectations for increased meal uptake, increased choice and reduced use of processed foods create new work pressures that are not reflected in the allocation of space and resources, which have reduced over time. This work uses analytical and visualisation techniques from systems thinking to produce systems maps that show how power imbalances shape the practice of school food and makes recommendations for how policy makers can use the expertise of food workers to improve outcomes.