Food for Life Partnership

"The Innovation Unit really helped us grapple with a couple of significant issues and helped us to understand what we do well and areas where we could improve. They quickly grasped the issues we were facing and undertook a widespread strategic review, the outcome of which provided broad reaching and valuable recommendations to help us gain agreement with our partners and stakeholders, as well as develop the skill sets within our own team. With their well embedded influence in the education sector, they have been able to position our work into key areas which we would not have been able to reach on our own. The team from The Innovation Unit are always responsive and helpful, and show a clear understanding of the aims of our project." - Emma Noble, Director   

The Innovation Challenge

The Food for Life Partnerships's (FFLP) mission is to transform school and community food culture across England. It aims to reach out through schools to give communities access to seasonal, local and organic food, and to the skills they need to cook and grow fresh food for themselves. This will help this generation of children to explore how their food choices impact on their health and that of the planet, and to rediscover the pleasure of taking time to enjoy real food.

Over the five year period of the programme, FFLP will work closely with 180 flagship schools (20 in each region) to transform food culture and have an influence on the wider community, with a view to having 3.600 schools engaged by the end of the five year period. The Innovation Unit was commissioned to conduct a strategic review of the FFLP focus and activity to ensure it meets its goals.

Our Approach

The review has been designed to address FFLP programme challenges and concerns, test assumptions around issues and produce findings that inform the development of a strategy to take the programme forward in ways that ensure its legacy.

The four key areas that the review addressed are:

• Effective strategies for school engagement for flagship and mark schools
• Support to schools engaged with the programme to help them progress
• Sustainable plans for scalability and spread of FFLP practices
• Delivery team strategic alignment and operational capacity/capability development

The review and recommendations were enthusiastically received by the FFLP Board and many recommendations are already being adopted. All are now being integrated into a revised strategic and operational delivery plan. This will help ensure greater support for the 180 flagship schools to learn from each other, and for them to provide more peer to peer support for the 3,600 schools to be engaged by July 2011.

Project contacts

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