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Danish island to give free hot school dinners to all children

The island municipality of Læsø has announced it will provide free meals to all children who go to schools run by the local authority.

Published: 30 January 2023 16:15 CET

Danish island to give free hot school dinners to all children

Illustration photo. Danish municipality Læsø has become the first to trial free hot lunches for all students. Photo by Anton Murygin on Unsplash

Læsø Municipality has confirmed that it will serve free hot meals to all of its schoolchildren, broadcaster DR reports.

The arrangement will run on an initial one-year trial basis. Its overall objective is to improve wellbeing and learning for school students, DR writes.

“There’s no doubt that it’s harder to get into fights with each other when you’ve just been sitting down to eat pizza together. Shared mealtimes create more calm, wellbeing and a better learning environment,” Læso School’s headteacher Henrik Mogensen told the broadcaster.

According to the national confederation for municipalities, Kommunernes Landsforening (KL), Læsø is the first local authority in Denmark to bring in a free school lunch scheme.

The new scheme will also mean that students will be able to sit with friends from other classes to eat their lunches. Before, classes sat together during lunch.

The cost of the free lunch scheme to the municipality will be around 500,000 kroner, DR writes.

“This is a really good initiative. Research suggests that an healthy and varied meal during school time can promote the wellbeing and health of students,” Dorte Ruge, a researcher in applied schooling at the UCL University College in Southern Denmark, told DR.

“When you are gathered for meals, that can give better relations between students, teachers and educational staff,” she said.

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'A superpower': How being bilingual can help kids thrive in Danish schools

A recent report in Denmark linked a lack of Danish spoken at home and lower economic status with poorer performance at school, but bilingualism in isolation is an advantage under the right conditions, a specialist in the area told The Local on Friday.

Around 40 percent of school students with immigrant backgrounds were considered to be underperforming in mathematics, reading and science. That compares to 16 percent of students with non-immigrant backgrounds, according to the report “PISA Etnisk 2022”, published this week by research and analysis institute VIVE (National Research and Analysis Center for Welfare).

For all students, regardless of heritage, socioeconomic status was a factor in school performance. In other words, students from strong socioeconomic positions achieve better PISA results on average than those from weaker socioeconomic positions.

The report states that the language spoken at home may also have an effect on school results, with students who speak some Danish at home more likely to achieve better results – although this effect is reduced when socioeconomic status is taken into account.

READ ALSO: Kids who don’t speak Danish at home ‘may find school harder’

However, the report may not identify the difference individual situations can make for parents, an expert in raising bilingual children told The Local.

Bilingual kids given the right encouragement and support at home and school are in fact likely to thrive, said Elisa Sievers, a cultural consultant and founder of Happy Children Denmark.

Sievers, who noted she had not read the VIVE report specifically, has observed bilingual schools and studied evidence on teaching multilingual children, at the Institute for Minority Education at University College South Denmark.

Larger studies don’t always look at “the kids’ class or socioeconomics, where they actually come from, how long they’ve been in Denmark or what kind of resources the family has,” she said, adding that a number of different factors, like the languages spoken and whether the parents speak Danish, can create different circumstances contributing to results.

Being bilingual “doesn’t take the academic level of a child down, quite the opposite,” Sievers said. “It’s really about creating a space where children feel seen and feel that all parts of their identity and their language skills are embraced, then the child’s full potential can get out and they can thrive and have better academic results.”

“If a child is not thriving then they won’t perform super well academically either.”

READ ALSO:

Difficulties can arise if bilingualism is framed negatively by educators, parents or others, such as “questioning whether [the child] speaks any language perfectly,” Sievers said.

“That will affect the way the child is behaving and the way the child wants to perform and experiment with learning languages in general.”

“If there’s a positive, embracing space where the child can develop and use their language skills in a positive way”, they will be able to thrive, she said.

To create an “embracing” environment for bilingual children, Sievers advocates parents “staying authentic”, meaning each parent being consistent about speaking in their own mother tongue.

“It’s important that while the children are small and learning to speak that parents stick to that, and then they can be more loose later when the child knows the two languages,” she said.

At school, teachers can “make a point of the child having a special skill” by encouraging use of the second language.

An example of this could be asking the child to explain something about their language or background to the rest of the class.

“Seeing the language background, talk about it as something positive and something that is a superpower for the child instead of being a problem,” she said.

Elisa Sievers has a monthly newsletter, with tips for teachers and parents of bilingual and trilingual children.

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