Early Start Nutrition Award Newham

Here at Early Start, our Nutrition Award recognises Newham settings who demonstrate best practice through their nutrition provision.

We’ve developed the award to reflect the EYFS framework and the Eat Better Start Better food and drink guidelines for early years settings.

Achievement of our award will support you to:
- showcase what you’re doing well
- identify areas of development to help you deliver best nutrition practice in your setting
- create opportunities for home learning
- generate evidence for Ofsted inspections.
- highlight your commitment around improving the health and well being outcomes for the children and families you work with.

To achieve an award, you'll need to submit information about your current practices and set goals to work towards, based on the following award criteria:
• Criteria 1- setting menu and food policy
• Criteria 2- health promotion
• Criteria 3- physical activity
• Criteria 4- cooking and learning about food
• Criteria 5- food safety.

Our awards are online, meaning you can work on your application when it’s convenient, and you can save your progress as you go.

Our Nutrition Award is tired, meaning we’ll support you to progress from Bronze, to Silver and then to Gold.

You’ll start by working on the Bronze Award, which requires you to complete an audit and then identify goals to help you develop areas of your practice.

After around 6-12 months, you’ll progress to work on the Silver Award- achieving best practice. This will help you to showcase how you’ve achieved the goals that you set yourself in the Bronze Award, and outline the impact this has had on the children and families you work with.

In year 3 you’ll work on the Gold Award- excelling in best practice. This will help you to highlight how you’ve embedded the 5 award criteria points, and support you to develop 2 case studies which highlights areas of development, based on the local priorities for children and families.

When working on the awards, you’ll receive tailored feedback and recommendations from our team of expert nutrition professionals. Your Newham setting will also get access to:
- Our suite of free online nutrition training for your staff, which will support your award applications
- A comprehensive review of your menus, and support around how to meet the EBSB guidelines
- Support materials, such as tip sheets, example menus and recipes.

When you achieve an award, you’ll receive a plaque and certificate of achievement to display in your setting.

Our team of expert nutritionists look forward to supporting you to achieve the awards and are on hand to guide you through the process.