In the first episode of a series on the early years from The Food Foundation Podcast, hosted by Hannah Brinsden, our Partner at Bremner & Co Dayna Brackley joins an expert panel including Neil Leitch from the Early Years Alliance, Sarah Ambrose, Area Manager and Curriculum Lead at Safari Child Care, and Charlotte Stirling-Reed, registered nutritionist specialising in feeding babies and children.
Together, the panel explore some of the themes from The Food Foundation’s recent report: Boosting Early Years Nutrition to Support a Healthy Childhood.
Neil shares powerful anecdotes highlighting the huge challenges some young children and their families face in accessing sufficient and quality nutrition. Charlotte reinforces the importance the first 1001 days of a child’s life and the need to focus on early years building the foundations of a child’s long-term food behaviours and health. Sarah captures the hugely complex challenges practitioners face in juggling government guidelines, child preferences, allergies, parent challenges, packed lunches, insufficient budgets and more; and stresses the need for more support for them to provide high quality nutrition support for children in this critical development phase.
Dayna discusses some key findings from our own recent report, Too Young to Count?, which reveals that around 290,000 under-fives will remain ineligible for a free meal after the expansion of free meals to children from families in receipt of Universal Credit, despite living in households receiving Universal Credit and attending formal childcare. Our findings highlight the stark disparity in nutrition support between the early years and school for disadvantaged children, and the essential need for more equitable policy related to food provision in early years, across access, quality and funding.
Listen to the episode here: