This policy brief shows how improving the quality of food leads to more children eating school food and demonstrates that this is what young people need. The briefing brings together two powerful bodies of evidence to make that case.

We describe the development of the Whole School Food Approach framework and its implementation in 12 European countries participating in the European-funded project, SchoolFood4Change. The framework was developed in 2022 by a multidisciplinary team following an evidence-based approach.

This study aims to provide a comparative overview of school food provision models in 17 cities across 12 European countries.

In this editorial, we describe the emergence of four milestone principles in connection with school health and nutrition programs.

UNESCO and Peking University collaborated with national authorities in Botswana, Nigeria, and Uganda to strengthen school health education and adolescent well-being in line with national priorities.

Poor nutrition and inadequate WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) practices significantly impact children’s health, nutrition, and cognitive development, especially in low-income settings.

School meal programs are a widely implemented safety net with documented impacts across social protection, education, health and nutrition and high estimated returns to investment (Alderman et al., 2024).

Free school meals feed more than 400 million children worldwide, making them the largest social programme in history. But how effective are they? And should even more governments provide free school meals?

In June 2025, the government announced that, from the start of the 2026 school year, every pupil whose household is on Universal Credit will be entitled to free school meals.

Across Africa, health taxes – that is, excise duties on tobacco, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) – represent one of the most underutilised but promising domestic revenue sources available to African governments.