Food environments in outside school hours care
By providing healthy food and drinks at your service, you are helping children to establish healthy eating habits for life. If you meet the nutrition related standards of the Department for Education’s Right Bite Food and Drink Supply Standards for South Australian Schools you will also address the healthy eating requirements of the National Quality Standard, Quality Area 2 – Children’s Health and Safety.
The main steps to meeting the nutrition related standards of the Right Bite Food and Drink Supply Standards are ensuring:
- all meals, snacks and drinks are written on the menu
- all recipes are documented
- ‘discretionary’ (‘red 1’ and ‘red 2’) foods and drinks are not on the menu
- a variety of fruit and vegetables are provided everyday
- water is freely available, and this is written on the menu.
If you are planning a new menu or reviewing your current menu, the key components to include in each meal are:
Breakfast
Breakfast should include:
- grain (cereal) foods such as bread or breakfast cereals. A wholemeal or wholegrain choice should be available every day. If you are serving a breakfast cereal, use the ‘search and assess’ function of FoodChecker to find a cereal which is low in added sugar (classified as green).
- Milk, yoghurt, cheese and/or alternatives. If you provide dairy alternatives such as rice or soy products, make sure these have added calcium. Look for at least 100mg calcium per 100g on the nutrition information panel.
- Where possible, try to serve some fruit and/or vegetables at breakfast.
Morning and afternoon tea
- vegetables
- fruit
- milk, yoghurt, cheese, and alternatives.
If you choose to provide grain (cereal) foods, make sure they are mostly wholemeal or wholegrain.
Drinks
At your service ensure:
- water is freely available and encouraged every day
- plain reduced fat milk is provided as a drink every day. Flavoured milk should not be provided every day.
These simple changes will help you create a healthier menu:
- adding easy fruit and vegetable snacks
- making simple swaps to move snacks from red to green
- replacing amber and red meals with green or healthier meal alternatives
- swapping amber or red ingredients in your recipes for green ingredients
- changing your cooking method
- using our ideas for recipe inspiration.
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