Unpacking Early Years Food Policy in 2025
What children eat in the early years has a lasting impact on their health, development and readiness to learn. The government’s Best Start in Life strategy sets out the ambition that all children should start reception ready to learn and good food and nutrition are essential to making that happen. Early years practitioners across the UK play a vital role in this, planning and preparing food, supporting children’s eating, and working with families to build healthy habits from the start.
However, navigating early years food policy has become increasingly complex. Practitioners must juggle statutory nutrition guidance, free meal entitlements, milk schemes, home-packed food, and wider family support, all alongside growing expectations of settings and staff. This blog explores the current landscape of nutritional support for under-fives in England, drawing on recent policy developments and the opportunities presented by Best Start in Life for funding, practice and the workforce.
Balancing guidance and reality: food provision in early years settings
In April 2025, the Department for Education (DfE) published the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) nutrition guidance, coming into force in September. It supports settings to meet the EYFS requirement that meals, snacks and drinks must be “healthy, balanced and nutritious”. The guidance includes age-specific advice on textures, portion sizes, sample menus and a simple “provide, limit, avoid” framework. From September, providers must “have regard to” the guidance as part of their safeguarding and welfare responsibilities under the EYFS. A separate DfE online hub continues to offer practical tools on food safety, allergens, infant feeding and menu planning.
Many providers manage a mix of meals served onsite and food brought from home, creating tensions between guidance and practice. Research by Pearce and Wall found that packed lunches often lacked balance, with ultra-processed foods making up 65.5% of energy intake and vegetables included in only 39% of meals. Children in more deprived areas consumed significantly more sugar and less fibre and vitamin C.
A related study by the same researchers found that portion sizes in school-based nurseries were often inappropriate, with cakes and biscuits frequently oversized. These findings highlight the gap between policy and everyday practice, underscoring the need for clearer expectations, better support for providers and families, and practical solutions that work across different meal provision models.
Voluntary meal charges and practical challenges for settings
Updated DfE statutory guidance confirms that charges for meals during funded hours must be voluntary and parents must be allowed to send food from home. While this protects access for families, it raises challenges for full-day providers. One nursery manager explained to me recently:
“Many children attend nursery for five days a week from 8 am to 6 pm. During that time, we provide breakfast, lunch, snack and tea. We are extremely concerned about the prospect of some children existing on cold packed food from home, particularly the very youngest. We would be unable to refrigerate that many lunchboxes or heat individual meals, so babies would be forced to depend on packets and jars.”
While national guidance sets the standard, providers need the resources, training and autonomy to implement it effectively, especially when managing food from home. As June O’Sullivan, CEO of the London Early Years Foundation, has argued:
“I just want the right to say no! We provide a balanced, healthy and seasonal menu, but we cannot monitor or store packed lunches from home, increasing risks like food allergies, cross-contamination and choking.”
These pressures expose the growing disconnect between national ambition and the day-to-day realities in settings. Stronger support, clarity and investment will be needed to ensure that providers can meet guidance in a way that protects children’s health, safety and dignity.
Free early years meals: expanding entitlement, but still no funding line
Some children in state-funded early years provision, such as maintained nursery schools, are already eligible for free meals if their families meet benefit criteria and their attendance spans lunchtime. These meals are delivered through the free school meal framework.
From September 2026, the government will extend eligibility to all children in households receiving Universal Credit, regardless of income level, removing the existing £7,400 threshold. This is a significant step towards greater equity in food provision. However, access remains limited to children in state-funded settings that already offer free meals. Most early years education is delivered in private, voluntary and independent settings, where there is no national entitlement to free meals and no dedicated funding line to deliver them.
This is where Best Start in Life could make a difference. The strategy commits to reviewing the early years national funding formula by summer 2026, with the aim of ensuring funding reflects need and supports stability, quality and inclusion. This creates an opportunity to design in food provision making meals a funded, expected part of early years education across all settings, not just some.
Nursery Milk Scheme: universal, longstanding but overdue for review
The Nursery Milk Scheme entitles all children under five attending approved early years settings to 189 ml of milk per day, free of charge. Babies under 12 months can receive powdered formula instead. The scheme remains one of the few truly universal offers in early years food policy. In 2024, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) called for a full evaluation of the scheme, the first in more than 30 years, to assess its nutritional and administrative effectiveness.
This renewed attention to infant nutrition comes alongside another important shift: for the first time, the EYFS nutrition guidance includes specific advice on breastfeeding. It recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months and continued breastfeeding alongside solid food for at least the first year. It also encourages early years settings to provide practical support for families, including a welcoming space to breastfeed, signposting to reliable information and policies that support the safe storage and use of expressed milk. This represents a long-overdue step towards addressing the “baby blind spot” in early years food policy, recognising the needs of the youngest children.
Healthy Start: helping families buy food and vitamins at home
The Healthy Start scheme provides a prepaid card to eligible pregnant women and families with children under four. It can be used to buy milk, fruit, vegetables, pulses and infant formula, and includes free vitamin supplements.
In July 2025, the government’s 10-Year Health Plan confirmed that the scheme’s value will rise from £4.25 to £4.65 between 2026 and 2027, a near 10% uplift, with the payment doubling for babies under one.
Early years settings, particularly those connected to health and family services, can play an active role in supporting uptake by signposting families and helping them navigate the application process. The Best Start in Life strategy, which commits to creating a network of Best Start Family Hubs in every local authority, offers a route for better integration of Healthy Start with other early years and nutrition services.
Bringing it all together
Taken together, these policies form a patchwork of nutritional support for under-fives. The new guidance raises expectations, while research on packed lunches highlights deep inequalities in children’s diets. Expanding free meal eligibility is a welcome move, but without dedicated funding for all settings, its impact will remain limited. Schemes like Healthy Start and Nursery Milk are valuable but underused levers, reliant on local leadership, infrastructure and capacity.
Best Start in Life provides a rare opportunity to embed nutrition into the core of early education. With the funding review and workforce reforms on the horizon, now is the time to move from aspiration to action and to recognise food not as an optional extra, but as fundamental to health, learning and a fair start in life.
What government should do next
The publication of the new EYFS nutrition guidance, alongside commitments in the 10-Year Health Plan and Best Start in Life strategy, shows that food is finally being taken more seriously in early years policy. That’s a real step forward. But translating policy into practice, especially in a system as fragmented and underfunded as early years, is far from straightforward. From my perspective, working with providers, local authorities and national partners, four priorities stand out:
- Provide a clear roadmap for implementing the new EYFS nutrition guidance, backed by funding and workforce training so all settings can deliver it well
- Introduce national, standardised monitoring of food in early years settings to support compliance, share good practice and drive improvement
- Extend free early years meals to all children in households on Universal Credit, regardless of setting, and implement auto-enrolment to ensure no eligible child misses out
- Ensure food provision is a core part of the early years funding review, with investment sufficient to meet nutritional standards across all settings without passing costs to families
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About the Author
Dayna Brackley is a Partner at Bremner & Co, where she leads work in food policy and advocacy, policy analysis, coalition building, government engagement, and framing and media analysis. She specialises in the commercial determinants of health and nutrition across the life course, with a focus on early years settings, school food, and food environments in higher education. Her work spans infant feeding, nursery meals, and the wider food systems children grow up in.