There is international recognition that investing in children and in their nutrition is pivotal for their immediate and long-term health and wellbeing. Schools are a critical setting with food and nutrition education (FNE) essential to whole-of-school health promoting approaches1. Research suggests that self-efficacy among staff development specialists such as curriculum planners can improve teacher competence, and by extension enhance student outcomes1.
The project used data from two scoping reviews, a survey of teachers (N=139), principals (N=139) and a deep-dive ethnography into four schools as case studies in Queensland, Australia2-4. This data informed the co-design of a scalable FNE Curriculum Planning Toolkit that integrated a whole-of-school systems approach. The Toolkit had to explicitly reduce the burden on teachers by simplifying FNE and ensuring it could be adapted to individual school contexts. The approach used a collaborative, scaffolded design-thinking framework for groups to develop solutions and prototypes using a ‘how might we…’ method for reframing challenges5.
Two workshops led by a curriculum designer with experience in design-thinking were held online. The thirteen participants were heads of curriculum, principals and HPE teachers from a diverse range of primary schools across Queensland. In addition, alongside the workshops an environmental scan was undertaken of FNE resources, and a tool was developed to assess the credibility and accuracy of the resources.
The two workshops identified key features for the Toolkit as: easy access to curriculum-aligned achievement standards and content descriptions; a bank of elaborations that are food and nutrition related; unit planning templates,; access to curated resources that are credible and accurate; a process for inquiry planning that integrated food and nutrition across a variety of subjects; sample inquiry based unit plans, curriculum aligned assessment and marking guidance. Participants also generated ideas for cross-curricular integration. Through a series of workshops and an iterative design process involving ongoing input and feedback from participants, the curriculum designer, and the web designer; the website www.schoolfoodies.org.au was developed. It was soft launched with positive feedback provided by teachers, teacher-educators and pre-service teachers.
A co-designed FNE Curriculum Toolkit has the potential to integrate food and nutrition across the Australian Curriculum: F–10 and support a whole-of-school approach. It can also save teachers time and engage students in inquiry-based learning directly linked to their health and wellbeing. The next steps are to scale-up dissemination and trial the efficacy of the SchoolFoodies Toolkit as a gateway to health and wellbeing.