http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/iser/2009-01

In many developed countries, children's diet has deteriorated tremendously over the last decades; resulting in significant increases in child obesity, but also in important deficiencies in those nutrients playing an essential role in cognitive development. In 2004, the Celebrity Chef Jamie Oliver embarked on a large campaign aiming at improving school meals in the UK. This paper uses the unique features of the “Jamie Oliver Feed Me Better” campaign to study the effects of healthy school meals on educational achievements of children in primary school. The Jamie Oliver campaign introduced drastic changes in the meals offered in the schools of one borough (Greenwich), shifting from low-budget processed meals, high in saturated fat, salt, and sugar towards healthier options. Since school meals were changed in one Local Education Area only at first, we can use a difference in differences approach to identify the causal effect of healthy meals on educational performance. More precisely, using pupil and school-level data from the National Pupil Database (NPD) and from the School census, we can compare Key stage 2 test scores results before and after the campaign, using neighbouring local education areas as a control group. We identify positive effects of the “Feed me Better” campaign on Key Stage 2 test scores in English and Sciences. The effects are quite substantial: Our estimates show that the campaign increased the percentage of pupils reaching level 4 by 3 to 6 percentage points in English, and the percentage of pupils reaching level 5 by 3 to 8 percentage points in Science. Moreover, we find that a substantial decrease in absenteeism in Greenwich schools after the campaign, in particular in “authorised absences”, which are more likely to be due to sickness (and therefore health). The rate of absenteeism falls by about .80 percentage points, which is about 15% of the average absenteeism rate in our sample, thus a notable effect. These effects are particularly noteworthy because they measure direct and immediate effects of improvement in children’s diet on educational achievements only. There could be additional benefits (in particular in terms of health), beyond the improvements in educational achievements, which we are unable to measure because of lack of data. Nevertheless, even if we only take these short-term benefits into account, we find that the campaign was very cost-effective, with costs and benefits similar to other policies (such as the “literacy hour”) implemented in the UK in the nineties.

This paper uses the "Jamie Oliver Feed Me Better" campaign to evaluate the impact of healthy school meals on educational outcomes. The campaign introduced drastic changes in the meals offered in the schools of one Borough, shifting from low-budget processed meals towards healthier options. We evaluate the effect of the campaign on educational outcomes using a difference in differences approach; comparing key stage 2 outcomes in primary schools before and after the reform, using the neighbouring Local Education Authorities as a control group. We find evidence that healthy school meals did improve educational outcomes, in particular in English and Science. Working Paper 2009-01 2009-01-28 Michèle Belot Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (Nuffield College, Oxford) mbelot@essex.ac.uk http://cess-wb.nuff.ox.ac.uk/michele-belot.html Jonathan James Department of Economics, University of Essex