Balancing food allergy in schools and achieving the school food standards: Can school vending help resolve the ensuing conflict?

The 2006 UK Government's school food standards has created an opportunity for schools to consider introducing highly nutritious, convenience snack alternatives, such as dried fruit, nuts and seeds. This has created anxiety among those who fear a consequent increase in incidence of allergic reactions in schools. The purpose of this paper is to present a controlled approach to secondary school vending, designed to minimise the risks of allergic reaction.

A consultation process with key organisations, together with an analysis of the vending process in schools has underpinned this work. The Health Education Trust, with experience of developing food and medicines policies in schools, has explored a practical solution to the common assumption that a nut ban in schools is the only way to offer protection to those students at risk.

A best practice guidance tool for “allergy‐aware” vending has been developed. It provides a framework for a common sense approach to tackling two potentially conflicting issues, identifying vending as a practical solution.

The toolkit is a free download, ready for pilot testing in secondary schools. This mutually beneficial approach to minimising risk is presented as a working draft. Revisions will be made following feedback from schools. This toolkit is not suitable for use in primary schools.

Achieving healthy eating goals for the teenage school population and safeguarding those pupils who have serious food allergies are important issues that merit mutual consideration. This paper explores the issues and proposes, for the first time a best practice guidance to both minimise risks and maximise health benefit.