Healthy Eating

We regard snack and meal times as an important part of our day. Eating represents a social time for children and adults and helps children to learn about healthy eating. We promote healthy eating using resources and materials. At snack and meal times, we aim to provide nutritious food, which meets the children’s individual dietary needs.

We follow these procedures to promote healthy eating in our setting.

• We ask their parents about their dietary needs and preferences, including any allergies. 
• We record information about each child’s dietary needs in the Registration Form and parents sign the form to signify that it is correct.
• We display current information about individual children’s dietary needs so that all our staff and volunteers are fully informed about them.
• We implement systems to ensure that children receive only food and drink that is consistent with their dietary needs and preferences, as well as their parents’ wishes.
• We promote that parents provide nutritious food for all meals and snacks, avoiding large quantities of saturated fat, sugar and salt and artificial additives, preservatives and colourings.
• We are a NUT FREE setting 
• We organise meal and snack times so that they are social occasions in which children and adults participate.
• We use meal and snack times to help children to develop independence through making choices, serving food and drink and feeding themselves.
• We provide children with utensils that are appropriate for their ages and stages of development and that take account of the eating practices in their cultures.
• We have fresh drinking water constantly available for the children. 
• We inform parents who provide food for their children about the storage facilities available in our setting. 
• In order to protect children with food allergies, we discourage children from sharing and swapping their food with one another.

Where we cannot provide cooked meals and children are required to bring packed lunches, we:

• Ask parents to ensure perishable contents of packed lunches are refrigerated or contain an ice pack to keep food cool;
• Inform parents of our policy on healthy eating;
• Encourage parents to provide sandwiches with a healthy filling, fruit, and milk based deserts, such as yoghurt or crème fraîche, where we can only provide cold food from home. We discourage sweet drinks and can provide children with water or milk
• We discourage packed lunch contents that consist largely of crisps, processed foods, sweet drinks and sweet products such as cakes or biscuits. We reserve the right to return this food to the parent as a last resort
• Provide children bringing packed lunches with plates, cups and cutlery and ensure that adults sit with children to eat their lunch so that the mealtime is a social occasion.
• We have a strict No NUTS policy

Please click here for some healthy lunch box ideas – https://www.nhs.uk/change4life/recipes/healthier-lunchboxes