Activities & Events
As a project team, we regularly engage with schools, communities, charities and policymakers. On this page, we share details of our activities and events.
Upcoming Events
March 2025 – School Dinners exhibition coming to the Food Museum
The SMS project is the official academic partner for an upcoming exhibition on school meals at the Food Museum, Stowmarket, Suffolk. Look out for upcoming info!
Past Events
12th December 2024 – School Meals Service Project Showcase, University of Wolverhampton, Walsall Campus
Gurpinder and Ellen from Strand 3 hosted a project showcase for colleagues at the University of Wolverhampton on 12th December. They showed our short film ‘Food for Thought: The School Meals Service’ and presented a snapshot of Strand 3’s findings on the way that the school meals service is classed, gendered and racialised. Feedback from colleagues was positive and thought-provoking, particularly as we begin to synthesise project data as we look towards writing our project monograph.
Friday 1st – Sunday 3rd November 2024 – History of Education Society Annual Conference, Liverpool Hope University
Laura, Gary and Heather presented a joint paper at the History of Education Society conference: ‘Decolonising the UK School Meals Service (SMS): Past, Present and Future’. The conference took place between 1st-3rd November at Liverpool Hope University. This years conference theme was ‘Transnational, Global and Imperial Histories of Education’.
Thursday 31st October 2024 – Training session for the Young Curators group at the Food Museum, Stowmarket, Suffolk
On 31st October, Heather, Laura and Julia visited the Food Museum in Stowmarket (Suffolk) to run some training sessions for the Young Curators group, who will be collecting data for the upcoming School Dinners exhibition and learning curation skills. The workshop involved training on historical source analysis, writing text for museum exhibitions, analysing oral history interviews, and conducting surveys and writing participant information sheets & consent forms (the latter two of which Ellen created the slides and resources for). Seven Young Curators aged 14-18 participated in our training.
Feedback from participants was very positive! We look forward to working together further with the Young Curators and Food Museum over the coming months ahead of the exhibition opening in March 2025.
Wednesday 30th October – Saturday 2nd November 2024 – Oral History Association Annual Conference, Cincinnati, US
Ellen from Strand 3 and Isabelle from Strand 2 co-presented a hand-on interactive workshop based on outreach work with one of our partner schools. Session title: ‘The UK School Meals Service: Past, Present – and Future? An Intergenerational Oral History Case Study’.
They presented on the creative workshop activities that they previously did with pupils from one of our partner schools, facilitated discussions on the benefits and implications of utilising creative methods in intergenerational oral history interviews, and encouraged conference participants to try out drawing their own school meal memories and imagined futures on paper plates, as our partner school children did! You can find some examples below. The conference was a fantastic opportunity to disseminate our research to international audiences and think through some of the potential implications of our innovative methodology for participants of different age groups. We also received some lovely feedback, with one participant stating that they were going to trial our method in their own research, and another expressing that they left the session feeling joy!
Friday 4th October 2024 – Helsinki Food Education Symposium
Ellen from strand 3 presented at the Helsinki Food Education Symposium about the project in a presentation entitled ‘What is the Place of Food in Schools?: Findings from the ESRC School Meals Service: Past, Present- and Future?’. As part of the two day event, Ellen also got the opportunity to visit a Finnish primary school and try a Finnish school meal, as well as learn about school meals and food education across various European countries.
Saturday 28th September 2024 – Festival of the Mind, University of Sheffield
Heather from strand 2 and Ellen from strand 3 attended the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind to show our short film, created in collaboration with SortOfFilms and Field Lane Primary. The event was held in the beautiful Spiegeltent in Sheffield city centre. Following the official premiere of the documentary and a Q&A, we invited attendees to share their own school meal memories on paper plates.
Watch our 9 minute documentary below!
Wednesday 11th September 2024- British Educational Research Association Conference, University of Manchester
All three strands of the project presented papers in a symposium entitled ‘The School Meals Service – Past, Present and Future? Cultural Difference and Decoloniality’. The symposium consisted of the following papers:
Strand 1: Universal service or diverse provision? The School Meals Service in England and Wales, 1944-1980
Strand 2: Oral history, decoloniality and experiences of the School Meals Service.
Strand 3: Intersectional Experiences of the School Meals Service: Negotiating Classed, Gendered, and Racialised School Food Policies
Thursday 5th September 2024 – International Standing Conference for the History of Education, online.
Gary from Strand 1 and Heather from Strand 2 presented papers as part of the ISCHE online panel: ‘(De)colonizing processes in educational history: agents, policies, reforms and resistance’.
Wednesday 28th August 2024 – Royal Geographical Society Conference, RGS and Imperial College London
Ellen from strand 3 attended the Royal Geographical Society Conference in London between 27-30th August, where she presented a paper entitled: ‘“If we’re not feeding our children and they’re going home hungry, then we’re failing”: Schools as providers of food and ‘more than food aid’’. Her paper was part of a session sponsored by the Food Geographies research group. In the paper, Ellen spoke about the ways in which schools go above and beyond to support families experiencing food insecurity.
Tuesday 9th July 2024 – Social History Society Annual Conference, University of Durham.
Laura from Strand 1 of the project presented a paper entitled: ‘[A] very vexed question’: School meals supervision, teachers, and professionalisation, c.1906-1968′.
Saturday 6th July 2024 – Oral History Society Festival, British Library, London.
The Strand 2 team led a workshop about the use of sensory memories in our new oral histories of the School Meals Service. This interactive session shared recordings from interviews and invited participants to reflect on the value and ethics of a focus on the sensory. Isabelle Carter and Heather Ellis, ‘The Sensory as Method? Sensory memories in oral histories of the UK School Meals Service’.
Thursday 4th July 2024 – Children’s History Society Conference, Newcastle University
All three strands of the project presented a paper to share progress updates and our latest findings.
Laura Newman and Gary McCulloch, ‘From Policy to Practice: The development of the School Meals Service (SMS)’.
Isabelle Carter and Heather Ellis, ‘Children’s Culinary Worlds: School Meals, Memory and Experience’.
Ellen Bishop and Gurpinder Lalli, ‘Entanglements of the School Dining Hall: Current Perspectives on the School Meals Service (SMS)’.
Monday 24th June 2024 – The International Education Studies Association (TIESA, formerly BESA) Conference, University of Winchester.
Ellen from Strand 3 presented a paper titled: ‘The School Meals Service: Policy, Practice, and Innovation’. The paper shared some of the brilliant practices of our partner schools around creating a school food ethos and promoting food education. Here is Ellen in the very pretty conference venue, which also doubles as a wedding venue over the summer!
Friday 21st June 2024 – Team away-day, UCL
Strands 1, 2 and 3 met in person this month to share progress updates, finalise conference plans for the summer and autumn, and make plans for publications including our project monograph and forthcoming article with History of Education.
Tuesday 18th June 2024 – Oral history and intergenerational perspectives of the UK School Meals Service, Life Cycles Seminar Series, Institute of Historical Research, London
In June, Heather and Isabelle from the Strand 2 team spoke about intergenerational perspectives of school meals based on our new collection of oral history interviews. The paper asked: how do historians work with accounts narrated from different perspectives across the life cycle, particularly when they are shaped by the experiences both real and imagined of family members and children past and present? We reflected on how these issues are shaping our analysis and what they can tell us about the experience of school food across generations.
Tuesday 21st May 2024 – Food Geographies Research Group Workshop, Coventry
In May, Ellen from our Strand 3 team attended a two-day workshop in Coventry focusing on ‘New Directions’, organised by the Food Geographies Research Group. Attendees discussed key issues, literature, and challenges, with Ellen focusing on ‘food justice and citizenship’. The workshop was a great opportunity to share project findings and helped Ellen to think through some of themes arising in the data from the present-day experience of school meals, such as spatialities, power, and care. Attendees also got the opportunity to visit Serendipity Garden, a local allotment, and sample a meal made almost entirely out of allotment produce at the Food Union!
Wednesday 13th March 2024 – School Meal Memories: Oral Histories and Communities of Experience in Twentieth-Century Britain, History of Experience Conference, Tampere University, Finland
In March, Isabelle from Strand 2 spoke about school meal memories and communities of experience at the History of Experience Conference in Tampere, Finland. The paper explored how our oral history interviews – a series of conversations with individuals and groups about their memories, impressions and feelings about school meals – can help historians to understand society in the past and present.
Wednesday 6th December 2023 – Cost of Living Crisis: The Rise of Food Banks in Schools, University of Wolverhampton, Walsall Campus, WA007
This event aims to raise the awareness of the rise of food banks in schools. Over 4 million children in households are affected by food insecurity. The Food Foundation (2022) define food insecurity as those individuals and families who have limited or unreliable access to food due to the lack of financial resource. Schools are playing a critical role in combatting against food insecurity by operating food banks. This is an opportunity to join the debate and explore ways in which we can develop a call to action.
We are working in collaboration with Walsall North Food Bank and welcome donations to this event.
17-19th November 2023 – History of Education Society Conference, INOX, University of Sheffield
We presented on the SMS project in a panel session ‘School Food Histories: Emotions, Experience and the Sensory’ on Saturday 18th November 2023, 1-2:30pm.
Strand 1: The School Meals Service: Legislative and Policy Histories, Prof Gary McCulloch and Dr Laura Newman (UCL)
Strand 2: The School Meals Service: Oral Histories, Dr Heather Ellis and Dr Isabelle Carter (University of Sheffield)
Strand 3: The School Meals Service: What is the Role of Food in Schools?, Dr Gurpinder Lalli and Dr Ellen Bishop (University of Wolverhampton)
29th November 2023 – University of Birmingham’s Geographies of Children, Young People and Education group, Invited Speaker: Dr Ellen Bishop
School Meals Service Project- What is the Role of Food in Schools?
The School Meals Service (SMS) project, funded by the ESRC, aims to consider the aims, achievements and limitations of the SMS since its inception in 1906 and what can be learned from past and current lived experiences of the SMS for future provision. Strand 3 of the project, the focus of this presentation, specifically considers the current day experiences and provision of school meals and the place of food in schools. Data collection involved four partner schools in Bradford, London, Cardiff and Glasgow, consisting of ethnographic observations in school gardens, dining spaces and classrooms and ‘hanging out’ sessions designed to capture the informal conversations and social interactions of participants. This was in addition to conducting interviews with teachers, catering staff, pupils and parents to learn more about the school and place of food within it. This presentation will discuss the methodological approach to the research and some initial findings from the fieldwork conducted in strand 3 on the role of food in schools and the spatialities of school meals.
2nd November 2023 – UCL ICHRE Seminar: Science, taste, and the development of school meals in World War Two Britain, Dr Laura Newman
Historians of the British school meals service (SMS) have spent much time probing the politicisation of the nutritional sciences at the Board of Education (BoE). They point to the selective uptake of experimental knowledge on vitamins and malnutrition by the BoE as evidence of institutional inertia, which in turn limited the effectiveness of the SMS in the fight against childhood hunger. This paper instead centres an underexplored scientific tool – that of taste – and the role it played in the development of school meals at both the BoE and beyond. It poses questions such as: how were the tastes of children both accommodated and marginalised by nutritional experts invested in the expansion of the SMS? What different kinds of methodologies were in place to explore the sensory preferences and needs of children during a much larger nationwide experiment in communal eating? By answering these and other questions, this paper proposes the need for multi-sensory histories of childhood feeding that recognise the complex iterations of children’s agency within different geographies of food and feeding.
Saturday 21st October 2023 – ESRC Festival of Social Science ‘School Food Memories’, Burngreave Vestry Hall, 2 Burngreave Rd, Sheffield, S3 9DD
Spam fritters, corned beef hash, jam sponge with pink custard… what are your memories of school meals? The School Meals Project explores the impact of school meals in Britain, from 1906-present day. This event at Burngreave Vestry Hall gave attendees an opportunity to find out about the history of school meals, share their memories and even taste some classic school dinner foods!
Saturday 14th October 2023 – BBC Radio Sheffield
Listen to Dr Heather Ellis and Dr Isabelle Carter speaking about the SMS project on BBC Radio Sheffield. Listen from 2:09:25- 2:12:34, 2:15:18- 2:28:56 (Must be signed into BBC account to listen, only available until 12/11/23)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0ggq9g3
Saturday 16th September 2023 – Zest Centre, Sheffield: ‘Memories of Childhood Food’ Event
The School Meals team worked with the Zest Centre, Welcoming Cultures, and Walkley Historians to create an event that celebrated and recorded Sheffield’s rich community heritage through food. Activities included sharing memories of school meals, contributing to a community recipe book, and mapping different food cultures across the world and arts and crafts.
17th July 2023 – British Nutrition Foundation and Magic Breakfast
Invited speaker: Dr Gurpinder Singh Lalli discussed issues such as:
- The role of breakfast in improving dietary quality and providing a nutritional safety net for children and young people
- Breakfast provision in schools as part of the whole school food approach including the potential impact for children experiencing food insecurity
- Ways to make breakfast clubs more inclusive
- Measuring impact of school breakfast programmes on health, behaviour and learning
29-30 June 2023 – BESA Conference
Keynote Speaker: Prof Gary McCulloch ‘The School Meals Service in a Changing Society: Aims, Achievements and Limitations’.
https://educationstudies.org.uk/news-item/besa-2023-conference-keynote-speakers/
28 May 2023 – Child Food Poverty and Whole-Foodchain Organisation
FAWN, Dr Gurpinder Singh Lalli, Roundtable discussion on Children, Families and Food Security
18 April 2023 – Facultad de Educación, Universidad Complutense de Madrid: Prof Gary McCulloch
18-20 November 2022 – History of Education Society UK Conference 2022: Dr Heather Ellis ‘Curating the history of school meals: memory, experience and methodology’