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SCHOOLS

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.

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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SCHOOLS

Danish watchdog discovers violent harassment of teachers at 46 schools

Authorities in Denmark have required school leaderships to intervene against violence and harassment aimed at teachers on scores of occasions in recent years.

Danish watchdog discovers violent harassment of teachers at 46 schools

The Danish Working Environment Authority (Arbejdstilsynet), the government authority responsible for inspecting conditions at workplaces, issued 57 different orders at 46 different schools related to harassment and violence against teachers and childcarers over a three-year-period from 2021 to 2023.

The frequent number of cases was reported by teachers’ journal Fagbladet Folkeskolen and the national centre for investigative journalism, Gravercentret, via an access to documents request.

When an order is issued by the authority, this means that Danish working environment laws have been breached, obliging the employer to find a resolution to the problem.

READ ALSO: One in five children at Danish schools has 10 percent absence

Problems related to violence, threats and harassment at the 46 schools were reported by the Working Environment Authority to be so serious that they “can degrade the physical or mental health of staff in the short or long term”.

A review of the reports by Fagbladet Folkeskolen and Gravercentret showed that incidents of harassment or physical attacks took place on a daily or weekly basis.

One report from a school in the town of Hillerød north of Copenhagen stated that “employees experience physical or psychological violence so often that their boundaries and norms are shifted. Some of them consider it normal to be hit or kicked at work”.

Inspectors at a school in South Jutland town Haderslev meanwhile observed that staff “shut down their social lives at weekends to recover before going back to work and they don’t have the energy to spend their holidays on things like vacation with family”.

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