School meal nutrition policy and procurement in England: Governance variability and local innovation in implementation settings

Healthy, sustainably sourced school meals are recognised as a means to advance health, environmental, and economic goals within food systems. Achieving these benefits in practice, however, often requires operating across a complex, multi-level policy and governance landscape. In England, two key interrelated policy areas are: national school food nutrition standards and the public procurement rules governing food in schools. Policy change is advocated for in these areas to improve food system outcomes with a key concern that implementation lags behind policy ambition. This paper introduces the concept of implementation settings to examine how school food policy and procurement are enacted through everyday practice. In England, these settings are shaped by a fragmented governance landscape, following decades of neoliberal restructuring. This has resulted in diverse arrangements and variable implementation outcomes, as multiple actors, including central government, local authorities, schools and Academy Trusts, private providers and charities and NGOs have taken and been delegated differing responsibilities.
The paper draws on qualitative data from a research project that introduced British-grown beans into primary school meals across two neighbouring local authorities. This project serves as a lens to examine how policy is operationalised in the absence of formal implementation mechanisms, and how governance processes vary locally. Findings illustrate how local and institutional innovation and entrepreneurship can emerge within implementation settings. However, the wider influence of regulatory governance, inadequate state funding and structural ideological pressures can also result in poor outcomes. By foregrounding implementation settings as a critical site of governance, the paper contributes to understanding the social, institutional, and contextual conditions that enable or inhibit effective school food policy implementation. It offers practical and theoretical insights for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand, navigate and transform institutional food systems governance.