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.