By Lois Anderson, Registration Inspector and Improvement Adviser

Last week we launched our latest resource Food Matters: nurturing happy, healthy children. This explores good practice examples from across the early learning and childcare (ELC) sector in Scotland that support children to have positive eating experiences and enjoy well-balanced nutritious food.

The Care Inspectorate wants to help make Scotland the best place in the world to grow up and this resource is published as part of our ongoing programme to encourage, promote and bring about improvement in how people experience care.

Food Matters is intended to be practical, inspirational and support improvement. We have worked alongside the ELC sector to enable providers, practitioners and families to tell their own stories of how they are supporting children to eat well and enjoy good food every day.

For the launch, we visited Cornton Nursery, one of the services who shared their story in the resource. The Stirling service, which provides care for up to 66 children, has a number of initiatives, including an outdoor garden with opportunities to explore the value of the ‘plant to plate’ experiences and a family learning programme for parents. Parents and carers are involved in every aspect of nursery life and they are able to purchase very reasonably priced produce from the nursery’s Fruit and Vegetable Barra at the beginning and end of each nursery session.

Our chief executive Peter Macleod joined us at the launch and, as you can see from the photos, he had a great time meeting the children, hearing from them about their experiences, enjoying the outdoor space and helping them prepare some delicious healthy food for lunch. He said: “We want to see all care services ensure children are offered well-balanced, nutritious and appetising meals that include fresh fruit and vegetables.”

We hope that providers and practitioners will use this resource to initiate innovative practices to support children to eat well and develop positive relationships with food. We link all the examples to the new Health and Social Care Standards, which set out what people should expect from their care and support, and to the Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) wellbeing indicators. This resource complements, and should be used alongside, NHS Health Scotland’s Setting the Table, the nutritional guidance and food standards for the ELC sector.

We recognise that the earliest years of life are crucial to a child’s development and will have a lasting impact on their health outcomes. The stories we have shared in Food Matters cover a variety of good practice and show how services have made significant improvements both throughout their settings and for individual children and families. These examples demonstrate a range of different approaches, some are traditional and direct while others are gentle and nurturing.

Closing the poverty-related attainment gap is a key aim of the expansion of ELC in Scotland. Examples in this resource highlight the importance of children having access to high-quality nutritious food and understanding the difference this makes to them. We recognise that health inequalities and associated issues such as food poverty are complex. With this in mind, we have included an example of an initiative undertaken in Dalmarnock Primary School in Glasgow even though this is not a service within our regulatory jurisdiction. This example alongside others shows the many benefits of children accessing well-balanced and nutritious food through community-based activities and support.

Widening the practice examples beyond registered services reflects the Care Inspectorate’s duty to lead joint strategic inspections of the provision for all children in a local area, as well as continue to regulate individual services. This also reflects the broad scope of the new integrated Health and Social Care Standards, which cover the full spectrum of care beyond just regulated services.

You can download Food Matters here.