Under 5 magazine

BEST PRACTICE

The importance of early years nutrition

The Alliance’s Gary Croxon outlines coming changes in nutrition support for the early years and how to be proactive about nutrition in your setting

Gary is an Alliance business manager who supports on our CPD offerings, with the focus on the Alliance's business support packages and budget toolkit.

With food forming such an integral part of the day-to-day workings of the early years – and being so vital to the growth and development of little ones – it’s important to stay up-to-date on any changes in guidance or statutory requirements for the sector. This helps you to make sure that not only are you doing your best by the children in your charge, but that you’re also complying with statutory expectations.

In April 2025, the Department for Education released Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) nutrition guidance for group and school-based providers as well as childminders in England.

Further to this, a new requirement is likely to be included in the safeguarding and welfare requirements of the EYFS from September 2025 stating that providers ‘should’ have regard to the above-mentioned nutrition guidance. This guidance aims to support you in understanding how to implement the existing EYFS requirement: ‘Where children are provided with meals, snacks and drinks, these must be healthy, balanced and nutritious’.

What will the guidance changes look like?

All early years provision will need to have regard to this guidance, as it refers to children from birth to five years.

If you offer food to your children, you’ll need to take into consideration the following when planning your menus:

Do the children get the appropriate nutrition for their age range?
Is the menu balanced and varied across the week?
Do you review and reflect on what the menu is offering?
Do you introduce new menus to give children the chance to try different foods?

Food brought from home plays a significant role in the early years. But where providers offering their own food can control ingredients to ensure a healthy balance, a ‘packed lunch’ from home might not include items that provide a healthy, nutritious balance. It’s important that, as providers, you have the knowledge and information to tactfully support families in understanding what food should be brought from home.

Policies and communication

With this in mind, it’s important to have a food and nutrition policy to inform staff and families about your commitment to ensuring that a well-balanced, healthy and nutritious diet is provided for all children in your care, alongside the development of healthy eating practices that are fully supported and implemented.

Ongoing parent, carer and family communication on the importance of healthy, balanced and nutritious food is an integral part of creating a strong, ongoing relationship on your approach to food intake across the day. It’s also an opportunity to ensure children’s needs are met both at your provision and within the home.

Key questions

Mealtimes are an important time to develop social skills through interaction with others. They also promote physical development through use of gross and fine motor skills, giving children a chance to be independent. How do your practice and environment support both social and physical skills related to eating and nutrition?

Take some time to think about the environment you provide at mealtimes:

Are there distractions or high noise levels?
Are you meeting the needs of all your children?
Are you considering and assessing the variety of sensory difficulties related to food texture, taste and smell, or foods being mixed together/touching?

Unfortunately, guidance for early years provision all too often outlines what to do without sufficient support on how to do it. So, the Early Years Alliance has, alongside expert nutritionists, developed a number of resources to support everyone working in the early years – whether you’re new to food provision or looking to refresh and update your existing knowledge.

Launching mid-September, the Alliance will be enhancing its early years nutrition support to include resources such as two Nutrition Support resource packs. One of these will be for settings where snacks and food are brought from home, and the other for those offering meals and snacks; both include a food and nutrition policy template, as well as a menu-checking service, a menu and recipe development service, virtual packed lunch support for your team and families, and bespoke training sessions.

When purchasing any of these resources, you will have an Early Years Nutrition Support ‘Committed’ logo for your setting’s promotional material, demonstrating your commitment to good early years nutrition, for a year from purchase.

The new resources will be added to our current offer of accreditation, a menu check service, and our menu assessment or a quality mark. You can also become accredited and undertake a menu assessment or a quality mark. From October, nutrition Insights will be added to our CDP offer. Further information on these can be found on our website: bit.ly/nutrition-support-info.