Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans her Department has to introduce mealtime standards for academies.

The government encourages all schools to promote healthy eating and provide nutritious and tasty food and drink. The new School Food Standards came into force from January 2015 and have been widely welcomed.

The standards apply to local authority maintained schools, academies that opened prior to 2010 and academies and free schools entering into a funding agreement from June 2014. We encourage those founded between those dates to use the standards as a guide and sign up voluntarily to show they are following them. To date over 1400 of these academies have signed up voluntarily to the standards, and we encourage the remaining schools to commit to the standards.