Finland’s national school meal programme, one of the longest-running in the world, provides a free daily meal to all children and young people from pre-primary to upper secondary school. Nutrition guidelines for school meals, revised by the National Nutrition Council in 2008, are based on the Finnish dietary guidelines and the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations.
Nutrition education is integrated into the national school core curriculum, with school meals seen as a holistic tool with which to provide education on food culture, nutrition and sustainability. Home economics is the subject that primarily supports food education and promotes everyday skills such as cookery in Finnish schools.
School Food
Since the 1940s, Finland has had a National School Meal Programme that provides a free daily meal to every child and young person in pre-primary, basic and upper secondary education (nearly 850,000 pupils and students are presently entitled to a school lunch), and a free snack for children taking part in before- and after-school activities or school club activities.
The Basic Education Act (1998) guarantees that schools provide “a properly organised and supervised, balanced meal free of charge every school day”. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and the National Institute for Health and Welfare, together with the Finnish National Agency for Education, oversee national monitoring of the programme and the nutrition content of the meals and general welfare in schools.
School meals are an integral part of the national core curricula for basic and pre-primary education, and are viewed as a holistic tool to provide students with food and nutrition education, for example on food culture, nutrition and sustainability. The Finnish National Agency for Education coordinates and develops school meals from an educational perspective.
The National Nutrition Council, which is part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, develops, updates and coordinates the implementation of voluntary nutrition guidelines for school meals. Finland has separate guidelines for early childhood education and care, primary schools, and vocational institutions and general upper secondary schools. These guidelines include guidance for meals and also for food and nutrition education. Additionally, there are also food recommendations for families with children that includes more precise quantitative nutrition information for children.
The main characteristics of these standards are summarized below:
| Users of the guidance |
|
| School Food Covered |
|
| Basis | Food- and nutrient-based |
| Food groups covered | Vegetables, fruit and berries; grain products and grain-based side dishes; dairy products; vegetable oils, margarines, nuts and seeds; legumes; meat, fish, eggs; drinks; sweetening and use of sugar; low salt levels – iodised salt |
| Other guidance included | They also include recommendations on food and nutrition education and food etiquette |
Development process
A working group set up by the National Nutrition Council revised previous school meal recommendations from 2008, updating and supplementing them with catering guidelines for specific target groups ranging from early childhood education to upper secondary schools and adult students in vocational institutes. The working group consulted experts from the national steering group for mass catering at the National Institute for Health and Welfare, as well as experts in competitive procurement, school health care, oral health care and food safety.
The school meal nutrition guidelines are based on the Finnish dietary guidelines (2014), the Eating together – food recommendations for families with children, and the current Nordic Nutrition Recommendations. An update is planned to reflect the new Nordic Nutrition Recommendations (2022) and the national core curriculum.
Implementation
Municipalities and other education providers are responsible for the implementation of the school meal guidelines, with targets often written into the tendering process for food service providers. School meal menus are developed at the municipal level, usually by the food service provider, with planning mainly influenced by the school meal guidelines, price and by customer demand.
The National Nutrition Council promotes the uptake of the guidelines (available online) to food service professionals and those working within the education system. Vocational qualifications for school caterers include training on nutrition guidelines.
Monitoring and Evaluation
Municipalities are responsible for the monitoring and evaluation of the school meals programme in Finland. At the school level, the quality of school meals is continuously monitored as part of the overall education monitoring system. Food service providers themselves can check the nutrition quality of the meals with the help of specific software, standardised recipes and data from the National Food Composition Database, Fineli. Specialized inspectors are available for consultation.
Data on compliance with the nutrition guidelines is integrated into the National Institute for Health and Welfare’s school health survey, which also includes information reported by the pupils themselves. In 2017, 69% of schools reported compliance with the national guidelines for school meals.
- Eating together - food recommendations for families with children
- Eating and Learning Together – recommendations for school meals
- Health and Joy from food - meal recommendations for early childhood education and care
- Student Meals Benefiting Health and Communities – Food recommendations for vocational institutes and general upper secondary schools
- Learning from the Finnish experience – School Meals in Finland
School-Based Food and Nutrition Education
Since 2004, school meals in Finland have been part of the daily teaching, guidance and education tasks defined in the national school core curriculum thereby giving them an educational status. Food and nutrition education is integrated into school meals, combining activities in the guidelines, Eating and Learning Together – recommendations for school meals (2017). Education providers are expected to define the principles that guide school catering as well as objectives related to education on food, health and manners, and a sustainable way of life in the curriculum for each school. The entire school community is engaged in school meals, and teachers and other school personnel guide and mentor pupils during mealtimes. Student participation in school meals (assisting the school canteens) is also part of their education.
Home economics is the subject that primarily supports food education and promotes everyday skills in Finnish schools. It is taught from grades 1-9 with pupils receiving cooking lessons (optional for education providers for grades 1-6), while older students cover other content areas on “Food knowledge and skills and food culture” and “Consumer and financial skills at home”. Food and nutrition/life skills are also included in other subjects such as health education, physical education and environmental studies (food production), and integrated into materials used by schools and teachers. The central aim of the curriculum is to develop the school food culture and to promote instruction with an integrative approach.
- Home economics in basic education
- National core curriculum for basic education
- School Meals in Finland – Finnish National Agency for Education website
| Main Targets |
|
Main Educators |
|
| Integration within the school curriculum |
|
Development
The Finnish National Agency for Education developed the home economics curriculum, along with other sectors such as teachers and teacher training institutions and with a public consultation process. The guidelines for school meals, which explicitly integrate school food with food and nutrition education, were developed by the National Nutrition Council in 2017 and set out the path for food-related education alongside catering guidelines.
Implementation
The education provider is the main entity responsible for implementing the curriculum. Education providers and municipalities draw up curricula and annual plans based on the national core curriculum but with a local emphasis. Teachers are the main front-line educators, in charge of the guidance and education of the pupils at school meals, together with other school staff. For example, children in the meal situation are instructed to use good manners and to care for their own well-being as part of the core curriculum.
The National Nutrition Council and the Finnish National Agency for Education have both created resources to support teacher development in food and nutrition education, to support the guidelines and to help teachers integrate these recommendations into their work.
- Tasty Schools – Food joy for schools! (materials and teaching training for planning, implementing and evaluating food education).
- Food Radar project - Things to do for classes (RuokaTutka) – EU School Scheme education measure. The website provides food education materials (videos, printable sheets, learning environments and more) targeted from early childhood education and care to upper secondary school.
Monitoring and Evaluation
The education provider is responsible for the monitoring and evaluation of food and nutrition education in the curriculum. This is mainly carried out through national questionnaires and locally in different ways. Since food and nutrition are also integrated transversally in different subjects, the assessment of specific competencies and achievements may be part of the evaluation of each subject (e.g., examinations, activities in school, homework, etc).
Relevant Links
- The Right to food in Finland
- Food-Based Dietary Guidelines - Finland 2014
- Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF): School meal programme profile of Finland (2021)
Photos
Publications
School Meals Case Study: Finland
Prepared by the Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition, an initiative of the School Meals Coalition
School Meals for All - School feeding: investment in effective learning – Case Finland
In Finland, free-of-charge school meals have been provided since the 1940s, with the aim of supporting the educational system. Today, each school day, all pupils and students attending pre-primary, basic and upper secondary education are entitled to a free-of-charge, full meal. With its long history, the school feeding programme has become an integral and important part of the Finnish education success story. In order to tell this story globally, Finland, in collaboration with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), has for the first time collected the lessons learnt into a comprehensive document that follows the school feeding assessment outline developed by WFP.