Dover Park Primary School in Ryde has been awarded the PEACH Silver award for their successful ‘Healthy Choices, Healthy Prices’ project.
The project, which was led by Maria Kirby, the school’s PSHE leader, took place over the past 12 months and aimed to encourage healthier choices and to raise awareness of the benefits of nutritious eating on a budget.
Partnership for Education, Attainment, and Children’s Health (PEACH) is an Island-based health and education initiative, which schools can choose to undertake. This is led and quality-assured by the Isle of Wight Council’s Public Health Team.
Part of this approach includes an awards framework split between 3 levels of awarding, and unpinned by 4 key domains of health: Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE), physical activity, healthy eating, mental health and emotional wellbeing. After successfully achieving a Bronze Award, schools can choose to progress to a Silver award.
The children and parents at Dover Park Primary actively participated in workshops, food-tasting sessions, and assemblies to learn about healthy eating.
The school has since introduced new policies around healthy snacks and lunchboxes, and families have shared their own ideas for nutritious meals.
Amongst a number of other activities, pupils also visited the local food bank in Cowes to understand how it supports the community and created a video to promote awareness of the service. They even supported the foodbank by providing food for families to benefit from at Christmas.
Jon Kirby, Headteacher at Dover Park Primary, says:
“It’s been lovely to see how the whole school community has embraced in this important project. Children are thinking far more about the benefits of healthy eating and it’s been a fantastic team effort with children, staff, parents and the local community involved”.
Regarding the school’s commitment to the award, Cath Hall and Lynda Evans from the PEACH team stated:
“This awarding showed a wealth of positive outcomes for the children. As mentioned, we were particularly struck by the level of pupil and parent voice feedback that helped this project evolve into the success that it has been. We loved the way the project has grown and included local services and businesses, the whole school approach, the inclusivity and the links to attendance. Everything came together to make this a very well deserved Silver award.”
Dover Park is extremely grateful to their catering provider, Chartwells, who worked closely with the pupils to involve them in the project.
Well done to Dover Park, much healthier than
McDonald’s rubbish.