I think probably Best in Class is already being overtaken by our Food for Life Partnership, the big lottery award I've just described to you, because that will, in effect, produce 180 Best in Class schools. But they won't be called Best in Class; they'll be called Food for Life gold standard.
Best in Class was an initiative that we put into place. And remember, we're a relatively small charity. We live off a shoestring. We just happened to be recognized as having great expertise in a fairly small area of education.
I think one was just to prove that schools could take a whole-school policy around food and nutrition, some physical activity as well, but not all...certainly not in England. Food and nutrition, sadly, is too often separate from policy on physical activity and recreation. I'm hoping that will change very rapidly over the next three to five years when we see the work coming out of Wales. And there is already an intimation that the English and Scottish governments are wanting movement this way.
But Best in Class was just a little toe in the water to show anybody who was interested enough to look at our website that where you have schools that were courageous enough to take the time to set principles around engagement of pupils in decision-making, you could work as a school to assess where you were, where you wanted to get to, what the particular emphasis was in your school, and work along those lines and achieve huge benefits.
We set relatively relaxed parameters in terms of overall outcomes. What we wanted to see were parameters that met the latest government guidelines, which are tough, parameters that involve children in the decision-making process through school councils and through the creation of a food policy working group, as well, of course, as a close partnership with a caterer, and, where possible, linked to the external community, which mutually supported the school and the school supported it.
We were also looking to see that the whole process of food and nutrition was used as a channel, not just for the engagement of pupils but for valuing them. The principle of this is an understanding that if you do anything badly in a school, it will have an impact on the way children perceive themselves, almost certainly on their behaviour, and certainly on their social education.
Where we have some schools that will see their lunchtime period as a problem rather than as an opportunity, we have a school where I see a bad senior management team, where I would ask the question as an ex-inspector/advisor, if you do that badly, what else don't you care about?
It's this principle of setting up a value system that sees everything in the school being done as well as it can and sees that process as a part of growing children up to take greater responsibility for the operation of the school.