Spatial barriers to the effective delivery of school food policy in UK primary schools: Findings from an Institutional Ethnography.

School food policy sets ambitious targets for improving child health and wellbeing through the provision of a nutritionally balanced school lunch, but there is very little evidence that policy and legislation designed to improve the quality of school food is having a positive impact on either the number of children choosing a school meal, or on improving children’s health. This paper reports on findings from an institutional ethnography carried out in three UK primary schools between 2017 and 2019 to explore the issue of low meal uptake. It discusses the spatial issues that school food workers reported as impacting upon their work and traces these issues to a divergence between school food policies and building design processes. It concludes with recommendations for policy makers to reconsider the spatial implications of school food policies that seek to increase uptake, and to work with the accounts of school food workers to improve policy impact.