The PhunkyFoods Programme:
- is an award winning programme teaching young children, aged 3 to 11 years, key healthy eating, physical activity & emotional health and wellbeing messages through art, drama, music, play and hands-on food experience.
- trains existing staff in early years settings and primary schools to deliver the programme and its messages; capacity building in settings, training the wider public health workforce in consistent and relevant messaging and leading to sustainability of the initiative in settings.
- helps settings to audit, construct and deliver relevant and personalised Action Plans in order to create supportive environments for a whole-settings approach to healthy lifestyles – no tick boxes here!
- aims to help early years settings and primary schools to engage with all children, and their families, in promoting tangible health behaviour changes in a fun, lively and positive manner across the entire academic year.
- provides a time-efficient way to inspire teaching and learning with innovative ideas in healthy lifestyles.
The PhunkyFoods Programme supports the health and food education of young children, aged 4-11 years, using a whole school approach to health. Working in partnership with Local Authorities, our schools’ programme forms part of the wider whole systems approach to a healthier weight.
The PhunkyFoods Programme was founded in 2004 by Sorrell Fearnall and Dr Jennie Cockroft, a partnership with a steadfast belief in the fundamental ideals of health promoting schools, and the determination to help inspire children and their families to overcome barriers and challenges to adopting a healthier lifestyle.
PhunkyFoods, firmly believe that early year’s settings and schools are ideal place-based locations for tackling health inequalities. However, the reality of the daily demands on schools and school staff, including a packed curriculum, challenging pupil behaviour, and staff assessment expectations, must be considered to ensure that setting staff feel comfortable and confident in engaging with the whole school approach to health.
Our children deserve the best chance for a happy and healthy childhood; one that inspires them to become happy, healthy adults of the future. Inequalities in social, economic and physical factors mean that some will struggle to attain that vision, but our mission at PhunkyFoods is to help inspire children, and their families, to overcomes these challenges and thrive. That starts with good education and modelling, incorporates motivational activities and rewards, and ends in behaviour change and habit formation.
Jennie and Sorrell launched the PhunkyFoods Programme in 2004 as an after-schools club in Harrogate, North Yorkshire … dressed as a banana and a carrot
Case Studies
Fiona McManus, PSHE Coordinator at Elmwood Junior School, CROYDON (July 2017)
The PhunkyFoods program has been absolutely fantastic this year. Wendy Walsh has delivered a number of informative assemblies and workshops to the whole school to promote healthy lunches and to deliver the message ‘Strive for Five’. In the most recent assembly, Wendy demonstrated how to make fruit smoothies and some of the children had the opportunity to taste them. In addition, Wendy ran an Egyptian food tasting session on Ancient Egyptian Day and she provided ideas for recipes for the Year 4 Roman day.
We have also appointed two PhunkyFood Ambassadors in the school who assisted Wendy in her most recent assembly. They have also delivered an assembly to promote the message ‘Strive for Five’ and their new message is ‘Drain your Drinks’, an initiative to stay hydrated every day.
At the beginning of this academic year, Wendy delivered a staff meeting about the PhunkyFoods website and all of the resource available for the teachers to use. The resources are extremely useful, interactive and informative. We look forward to working with PhunkyFoods next year
Charlene Carrett, PSHE Leader at Pegasus Academy Trust, CROYDON (1600 pupils across 4 schools)
We became involved with the PhunkyFoods Programme because we were missing a nutrition scheme of work and we wanted to teach more food related topics. We wanted our children to have a better understanding of how to live a healthy lifestyle. We have been running the PhunkyFoods Programme for one year now. All staff members were trained during an inset day and since then we have delivered parent workshops, assemblies, children’s food workshops and we have also used the resources and lesson plans during class work. The pupils are really benefiting from the PhunkyFoods Programme and they are now able to make and discuss healthy choices; they enjoy talking about food and can make healthy snacks. Our results in health and self-care in Reception have definitely increased this year as we placed a greater emphasis on PhunkyFoods in Reception. The Reception children are very articulate about discussing healthy eating and the benefits. We recently took part in food growing and sold our vegetables at a local market and we also involve parents in the programme through parent workshops. Moving forward we are working on supporting the Juniors more. The Juniors have topics and we would like them to incorporate the PhunkyFoods lesson plans through their topic work.
Fran Simpson, Head of School at Parkland Infant School, EAST SUSSEX (180 pupils).
We joined the PhunkyFoods programme in September 2015 to develop our healthy lifestyle work in school. Our Community Support Worker, Georgina, came into school to deliver some training on the programme which we then cascaded to all staff in both schools. A member of staff from our Junior school also attended the full PhunkyFoods training day.
We took part in a health check in January 2016 which was reviewed in June 2016. As a result of the health check, we drafted a new school food policy, arranged a farm visit for Year 1 and introduced staff eating with the children at lunchtimes. We set up a summer sports and summer holiday project, a food tasting project for International Food Day and a growing project plus a new reward system connected to making healthy choices.
The health check was a fantastic tool and together with a lot of effort from staff, we have made big changes in the quality of our teaching and learning on healthy lifestyles.
In our breakfast club, we now have fresh fruit everyday and the staff, who also use the PhunkyFoods website resources, made the ‘Supercrunch’ dish with the children. We have also worked to improve the quality of packed lunches.
This term we have been working with parents to get the key messages across. We have shared the resources on the website with them and we add a PhunkyFoods recipe to our newsletter every week. This term we held two workshops for parents and their children on the themes of healthy lunchboxes and getting active and in September 2016 we are introducing a parent/child aerobics and relaxation course.