It is important to first find out and record what your pupils are eating for lunch, whether it be a school meal or packed lunch. This will provide you with a ‘baseline’ from which to work, identify problem areas and evaluate progress. An audit can also be used to involve children and staff in the process, discuss what healthy choices are, and raise awareness of the children’s eating habits.
The idea is to get a representative ‘snapshot’ of the whole school. One day’s lunches is enough to do this, but obviously different classes or groups can be done on different days. Alternatively, if you are working with a particular year group or key stage as part of the curriculum, you can specify this in the audit and limit the audit to those classes.
There are several tools on this website for you to record the results of your audit:
- Lunch-o-matic quiz – a graphic series of animated questions intended to be used by pupils in the school
- Online form – a more traditional way of collecting the information
- Printable sheets
Once you have collected your data, you will be able to manipulate the data on the website and view graphs showing the results. You will also be able to download the data to use it in a spreadwheet application.