347: Do school meals really affect a child's learning?

<div>To mark <a href="https://www.lacansmw.co.uk/">National School Meals Week</a> in the UK, the Food Matters Live podcast is making a series of episodes looking at the challenges around providing nutritious food for our children in <a href="https://foodmatterslive.com/article/the-history-of-free-school-meals-in-the-uk-and-the-changes-needed/">the school canteen</a>.<br> <br> In recent episodes, we have heard from the school caterer’s trade body, <a href="https://laca.co.uk/">LACA</a>, about <a href="https://foodmatterslive.com/podcast/national-school-meals-week-the-reality-of-delivering-school-meals-food-podcasts/">the challenges they are facing</a>, and from <a href="https://www.schoolfoodmatters.org/">School Food Matters</a>, a charity fighting to improve school meals.<br> <br> Rising prices and supply chain issues are leading to some providers saying they will have to change their menus.<br> <br> In this episode, we meet Dr Jennie Parnham, a researcher at <a href="https://www.imperial.ac.uk/">Imperial College London</a> who has studied the impact school meals can have on a child’s learning.<br> <br> <strong>Dr Jennie Parnham, Researcher, Public Health Policy Evaluation Unit, Imperial College London<br> </strong><br> Dr Jennie Parnham is a researcher based in the Public Health Policy Evaluation Unit at Imperial College London whose work focuses on the inequalities in diet and nutrition for low-income children and the policies which can be used to address these. <br> <br> Through her work she has developed an expertise in policy evaluation, nutritional epidemiology, and nutrition welfare policies. <br> <br> These research interests were developed through her studies in Nutrition (BSc) at the <a href="https://www.leeds.ac.uk/">University of Leeds</a> and Social Epidemiology (MSc) at University College London. <br> <br> She completed a NIHR School of Public Health Research funded PhD evaluating nutrition welfare policies in the UK at Imperial College London. <br> <br> As part of this project, she used quantitativ