From subjects to consumers: Young children's agency and the marketisation of the School Meals Service

This talk emerges from extensive archival research that forms part of the ESRC funded School Meals Service – Past, Present and Future? project based at the Institute of Education, UCL/The University of Sheffield/The University of Wolverhampton.

In this paper I argue that children’s decisions in the school canteen fundamentally helped to reshape nutrition policy in the School Meals Service (SMS), a trend that helped to contribute to its increasing marketisation in postwar Britain. With the rise of what was seen as the financially and socially autonomous, ‘mature’ teenager, the presence of direct competitors with the SMS in the form of outside caterers posed several problems. Not only did the outside café or pie and mash shop complicate aims to nutritionally provide for young people, but they also brought with them problems of social and moral contagion as young people interacted with the outside world during their dinner hour. Here the interconnected problems of ‘faddism’, food waste, and outside catering all placed challenges on the SMS as it sought to carve out a place for itself in an increasingly competitive catering marketplace in postwar Britain. In their efforts as policy actors to capture as many young pupils as possible, I will show how the latter were increasingly reconceptualised as ‘consumers’ rather than subjects in the eyes of both central and local government. 

Dr Laura Newman is a historian of education, medicine, and modern Britain. She had held several postdoctoral roles, the most current being that of Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ESRC funded School Meals Service – Past, Present and Future? project at the Institute of Education, University College London.