Better school food is welcome. But what about the children who can’t eat it?

This spring the government proposed the most substantial overhaul of the School Food Standards in more than a decade — and, as someone who has spent a long time working with children and families around food, I welcome it. Under the new standards, deep frying would be banned outright. Ultra-processed and high-sugar foods would be limited, wholegrains required more often, pulses brought onto menus, and fruit juice removed. Breakfast clubs would come under new nutritional standards, every school would appoint a lead governor for food, and menus would be published for parents to see. Alongside this, free school meals are being extended to every child whose family receives Universal Credit from September 2026 — expected to reach over half a million more children. That is a public-health decision of real consequence, and the direction of travel is genuinely good.

But there is a question these reforms don’t yet answer, and it’s one that clinicians and parents have been asking: what about the children who cannot eat the food at all?

That question is at the heart of a position statement I recently co-signed, as a board member of the Feeding Trust, in response to the government’s consultation.

We often talk about school food in terms of what is being served — whether meals are nutritious, fresh, balanced, and sustainably sourced. Those things matter enormously. Yet for a significant number of children, the issue is not simply nutritional quality, but whether the food provided is manageable for them to eat in the first place. Eating is a complex developmental skill learned over time, and for many children that process does not develop in the usual way. This includes children with paediatric feeding disorders and ARFID (avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder); children with sensory-based feeding differences and oral-motor or chewing difficulties; children with medical and gastrointestinal complexities; and neurodivergent children, for whom the noise, smell and social pressure of a busy lunch room environment can become a barrier before the meal even begins.

These children are neither rare nor a niche concern. Reviews have found signs of feeding difficulty in 25–45% of typically developing children, rising to as many as 80% of children with developmental disabilities. Among autistic children, feeding and eating difficulties have been reported in 50–90% of cases. And these needs are well represented in our schools: around 1.7 million pupils in England — almost one in five — have an identified special educational need, and 483,000 hold an Education, Health and Care plan. The Trust’s own recent cohort study, led by our founder Natalie Raven Morris and published this year in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, found that every child in the cohort had a skill-based feeding difficulty.

To its credit, the consultation does acknowledge that the new Standards must be flexible enough for children with special educational needs and disabilities, allergies, and different cultural and religious needs, and it strengthens the wording around reasonable adjustments. That is genuine progress. But at the level where families actually meet these Standards — in the dining hall, day to day — there is still no implementation guidance, no clear definition of what a “medical”, “dietary” or “sensory” need means in practice, and no mechanism attached to the duty. Nutritional quality is meaningless if the child the meal is intended for cannot safely, comfortably, or realistically eat it.

So in our statement, we asked for four things. We are not asking for the reforms to be diluted or delayed — better standards will benefit most children, and we want them to succeed! We are asking that:

1. The Standards name children with feeding difficulties explicitly — paediatric feeding disorders, ARFID, and developmental and sensory feeding differences — so that these children are clearly part of the population the Standards are meant to serve;
2. The duty to make “reasonable efforts” comes with real implementation guidance — worked examples of what “reasonable” looks like, and a clear role for clinicians, SENCOs, and parents in shaping provision;
3. The new compliance and enforcement framework for 2027–28 includes monitoring of adaptive provision, so that access to food is accounted for alongside quality of food; and
4. These reforms are joined up with the parallel SEND reforms, so that children who sit at the intersection of SEND and feeding difficulty don’t fall through the gap between two consultations that never referenced one another.

The Feeding Trust has spent the past decade building clinical expertise in paediatric feeding, led by the parent voice and lived experience. From this October, the Trust is becoming The Children’s F.E.D. Foundation, with a mission to build national capability through education, training, advocacy and research. Part of what the Trust can offer schools is its Eating as Learning approach — a developmentally informed way of supporting children to build eating skills alongside the food on offer, already in use across SEND and early-years settings.

The consultation closed on 12 June, but policy is only as meaningful as its implementation. The next stage — guidance, accountability, and day-to-day practice — is where children with feeding difficulties are most at risk of disappearing from view again. Nutritional standards matter enormously, but they are only part of the picture. A meal cannot be considered truly inclusive if the child sitting in front of it is unable to eat it. Both nutritional quality and practical accessibility must sit at the heart of school-food policy.

You can read the Feeding Trust’s full position statement on this site. And if feeding is something you’re navigating with your own child, you are always welcome to get in touch.