Setting the Table Guidance

Appendix 4: National policies

A number of key national policies supports nutrition in the early years; the most relevant are listed below:

Maternal and Child Health and Early Child Development

The Scottish Government is renewing its focus on pre-birth to three and has launched its Early Child Development Transformational Change Programme to provide oversight and better integration of policies. This work is focused on what happens during the period from pre-birth to three, when the brain and metabolic and immune systems develop fastest, laying the foundations for life. Evidence shows the 4 things that are needed for babies and young children to develop are:

• sensitive responsive caregiving
• play and stimulation
• nutrition and health
• safe from harm

The Scottish Government website provides a lot of useful information on maternal and child health policies and activities that aim to promote and support early child development including: Improving maternity and neonatal care^[3]; Milk and Healthy Snack Scheme^[4]; Free vitamins for all pregnant women^[5]; Maternal and infant nutrition Framework^[6]; Safer sleep for babies^[7]; Universal health visiting service ^[8]; Family Nurse Partnership^[9] and; School nursing^[10]; Vitamin D advice for parents^[11].

A Healthier Future: Scotland’s Diet and Healthy Weight Delivery Plan (2018)

Early childhood - and, in fact, what happens before children are born - is a critical time for establishing good nutrition and healthy eating habits. Achieving Scotland’s dietary goals and our ambition to halve childhood obesity, demands action to transform the food environment - that is the environment that influences what we buy and eat - to support healthier choices and reduce the excessive consumption of food and drink high in fat, sugar or salt. The Delivery Plan sets out a wide range of action across Government, with a primary focus on prevention, to support children and their families to eat well and have a healthy weight.

Early Learning and Childcare

High quality Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) can make an important contribution to children’s outcomes, particularly when they are growing up in disadvantaged circumstances. That is why delivery of high quality ELC experiences for all children is at the heart of our approach to ELC. Evidence shows that universally accessible and high quality ELC helps to provide children with skills and confidence to carry into school education, and is a cornerstone for closing the poverty-related attainment gap between children from the most and least deprived communities.

Since August 2021, all local authorities have been offering 1,140 hours of funded Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) to all eligible children, making high quality early learning

and childcare available to families. All three and four year olds, and eligible two year olds, have a statutory entitlement of up to 1140 hours per year of funded ELC. Local authorities have a duty to make this service available to all eligible children within their area.

National Standard for all funded providers sets out quality criteria that all providers are required to meet to deliver the funded 1140 ELC entitlement.

The Scottish Milk and Health Snack Scheme

The Scottish Milk and Healthy Snack Scheme (SMHSS) is a universal preschool policy which supports healthy growth and development in children by promoting and establishing healthy eating habits from an early age that can last into later life. The SMHSS offers all regulated day care settings funding for the provision of a daily portion of fruit and/or vegetables as well a free daily portion of milk or specified non-dairy alternative or first infant formula (for children under 12 months) for every child spending two hours or more in their care.

The SMHSS aims to reduce the impacts of health inequalities, malnutrition and child poverty and to improve better access to healthier food by removing the cost of a daily portion of milk, or non-dairy alternatives and healthy snacks from parents’ pockets.

Best Start Foods

The Best Start Foods payment has replaced the Healthy Start Voucher scheme in Scotland. Best Start Foods aims to tackle the impacts of child poverty by improving access to healthy foods and milk for eligible families on a low income.

Best Start Foods provides financial support to help pregnant people and families with children under the age of three, who receive certain benefits, purchase healthy foods. Some young people can claim without the need to receive benefits. The payments - which are delivered via a pre-paid card - double from birth until a child turns one to support breastfeeding mothers or help with the costs of providing first infant formula milk.

Best Start Foods, the 3 Best Start Grants and Scottish Child Payment are known as the five family payments. Delivered by Social Security Scotland, these payments aim to give children the best start in life.

Tackling Child Poverty and Social Justice

Cash-First – Towards ending the need for food banks in Scotland

Scotland is the first nation in the UK to publish a Plan, grounded in human rights, that works towards ending the need for food banks in Scotland. The Scottish Government will take forward 9 actions over 3 years (2023/26) to improve the response to crisis, including a new £1.8m Cash-First Programme to improve urgent access to cash in a crisis.

Infant Food Insecurity – Responding and Preventing: Guide

The Infant Food Insecurity toolkit was published on 9^th February 2024. It forms a guide for local areas to develop and enhance existing Child Poverty and Income Maximisation pathways. Through this work, cash-first responses are being promoted so that families can make choices about the food and other essentials that best meets their needs, and to reduce the need for food banks in line with our Plan.

Outdoor learning

Out to Play sets out how ELC practitioners can enable children to have enjoyable and unhurried food and drink experiences; enable children to make their own food and drink; and ensure children have free access to drinking water at all times.

Caring for Our Outdoor Spaces also supports children’s learning around food waste, composting and using less water.

Food and Drink provision for Primary Schools

When a child starts in primary school, we continue promoting healthy eating through our Regulations governing the nutritional requirements for food and drink served in schools and these Regulations have now been in place since April 2021. The Regulations are based on scientific evidence and dietary advice which are designed to ensure children and young people are provided with an appropriate amount of energy and key nutrients to support their healthy growth and development.One of the key measures brought about by these Regulations is that all children and young people must be offered at least two portions of vegetables and one portion of fruit with their lunch and have access to fruit and vegetables at other times of the day where food is served (for example a breakfast club or tuckshop). This helps to ensure that children and young people can access more of their five portions of fruit and vegetables on any day when they attend at school. The Regulations have also seen a reduction in the amount of sugar contained in foods served during the course of the school day.

We are also promoting increased uptake of school meals by universally offering free school lunches during school term-time to all children in primaries 1 to 5, and in special schools, where those schools are either run by their local authority or if they are funded directly through a Scottish Government issued grant.

Further information about our school food and drink Regulation is available within the Healthy Eating in Schools guidance, which can be found on the Scottish Government’s website.

Food Waste

Reducing food waste is a significant, and growing, challenge across Scotland. The 2021 Scottish Food Waste Estimate revealed food waste levels have increased since 2013 and wasted food in 2021 contributed 6% of Scotland’s carbon emissions. This highlights the role that tackling food waste could play in our just transition to net zero.

To help tackle food waste, the Scottish Government has committed to reset its approach. Our review of progress since 2019 made clear that previous actions have not yielded desired results and we have begun the process of resetting our approach by acting on lessons learned through the review and proposing more tailored actions to address gaps and challenges. This has included proposing priority measures to explore options for mandatory reporting on food waste and surplus by businesses, and delivering an intervention plan to inform household behaviour with regards to food waste.

Good Food Nation Plan

The national Good Food Nation Plan represents a fresh approach to food policy and it embeds long-term strategic transformation into decision making at both the national and local levels. Future iterations of Setting the Table will be developed with regard to the six over-arching Outcomes in the Plan.

Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC)

‘Getting it right for every child’ (GIRFEC) is our national approach to promoting, supporting and safeguarding the wellbeing of all children and young people. It provides a consistent framework and shared language which puts rights and wellbeing at the heart of policies and services across all public and third-sector organisations providing support to children and their families. Within the ‘Getting it right for every child’ framework is a range of support from universal, additional, specialist and intensive services which can be delivered through local or national single agencies or jointly through an integrated approach.

The GIRFEC National Practice Model supports practitioners across services to identify, assess, and analyse a child or young person’s wellbeing needs. It brings together the My World Triangle, Resilience Matrix and eight Wellbeing Indicators to help practitioners consider ways in which they can improve wellbeing for a child or young person, including whole-family support.