Since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant rise in student absenteeism in the US and elsewhere. Meanwhile, food insecurity remains a persistent issue across the globe, including in the US. Food insecurity shapes students' immediate and wider contexts and may worsen school attendance. Applying ecological systems theory, we…

In September 2022, the Institute for Fiscal Studies' Deaton Review drew attention to clear evidence that the UK compulsory education system is failing to tackle inequality. Their analysis demonstrated that attainment gaps between pupils who are eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) and those who are not exist across all stages of education.…

According to the Ethiopia Ministry of Education (2015), school feeding initiatives, such as feeding children in food insecure conditions, providing educational resources, and school meals are essential for supporting access to general education. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of school feeding program on the academic…

Free school meals provide support to vulnerable families in the Republic of Ireland. Funding is allocated as part of an anti-poverty strategy. An investigation was carried out to discover if the school meal could be used to provide nutritious scratch-cooked food as well as providing opportunities for increased socialisation and pedagogy. Food…

The latest round of fiscal austerity in Ghana has meant that the feeding rate paid to the service providers of Ghana's school feeding programme is both frozen and unrealistically low. Accordingly, service providers adopt discretionary coping strategies. This qualitative case study, therefore, explores the impacts of austerity on children's school…

Background: School feeding programs' evaluation requires the measurement of food insecurity, a more objective indicator, within school in low-income countries. The Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF) uses subjective indicators to report school feeding coverage rates across many countries that participate in the global survey of school meal…

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNGA, 1989) clearly spells out the significance of early child development (ECD). Through a descriptive comparative study, and by randomized control trial, the researcher investigates if free school feeding programs affect children enrollment at ECD centers in rural communities taking the case of Maraba…

In 2019, 135 million people in 55 countries were in food crises or worse, and 2 billion people did not have regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food. COVID-19 has exacerbated these hardships and may result in an additional 121 million people facing acute food insecurity by the end of 2020. Further, since the beginning of the…

Objective: School summer holiday clubs in deprived areas of Wales were evaluated to examine opportunities for healthy eating and physical activity and explore delivery processes. Methods: Ten Food and Fun clubs participated in 2016. Quantitative data (child and parent surveys; N = 196, N = 84) assessed the opportunity to provide children with…

This paper examines the discourse on school meals, as evidence suggests that political agendas feed into policy making. The paper fills a void by proposing new insights into how school meals could be reformed, following reflections from a doctoral study and a review of the changing narrative on school food in England. Recommendations include…

Although education stakeholders agreed on achieving Education for All by 2015, high wastage rates in developing countries has remained a major concern. In Kenya, data shows that more than one million primary age children are still out school. In many countries, school feeding programmes has been used as one of the interventions to promote…

This study sought to examine the extent of contribution of school feeding programmes towards the achievement of the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) policy in countries. Based on a purposive sampling of a deprived rural community in northern Ghana, the study utilised the concurrent mixed method design relying mainly on documentary…

Full Fact is an independent, non-partisan fact-checking charity. A particular focus is the analysis of factual claims in political debate in the UK; for example, fact-checking claims and counterclaims made during Prime Minister's questions. Facts do not appear in a vacuum as they are often used as key elements in an effort to make a coherent…

The paper explored the relationships between general weighted average (GWA) and type of parents' employment and educational attainment, type of family structure, study habits, nutrition, and extracurricular activities of fourth year college students aged 19-20. Using a stratified random sample, the population was divided into subpopulations or…

In Slovenia there is a unitary system of early education for all preschool-aged children. Since the vast majority of children attend full-day programmes, the daily routine represents a significant part of life for children in kindergarten. When systemic and curricular reform of preschools was introduced at the end of the twentieth century, lot of…