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OSHC play an essential role within the school community of care and role modelling to children. Providing quality food establishes the building blocks for ongoing positive nutritional habits.
There are standards that apply to the food and drinks provided and promoted during out of school hours care (OSHC) and vacation care.
Find out what the standards are and how you can improve your menu.
Standards and regulations
OSHC and vacation care must adhere to the:
- Education and Care Services National Regulations
- National Quality Standard benchmark around food and drink provision and promotion.
Why Right Bite standards are important in OSHC
It’s recommended that the Right Bite Food and Drink Supply Standards are applied to any food and drinks provided to children and students in schools.
The standards complement other strategies in schools that promote healthy food and drink behaviours, including learning opportunities through the curriculum. When you support the standards, you’re helping children:
- develop strong food literacy skills
- access a range of foods that are both nourishing and tasty.
The Right Bite standards contain food and drink provision advice to support the implementation of quality practices relating to nutrition, food and beverages, and dietary requirements (NQF Quality Area Standard Element 2.1.3). The standards also support environmentally responsible service provision (NQF Quality Area Standard Element 3.2.3).
The standards use a traffic light system (PDF 252 KB) to classify food and drinks.
Green – best options
The weekly menu should contain a minimum of 60% green category food and drinks.
Green category foods are:
- healthier choices
- a good source of nutrients
- low in saturated fat
- low in added sugar
- higher in fibre.
Food and drinks classified as green options are based on Eat for Health's Five Food Groups that make up the Australian Guide to Health Eating. These include:
- grain (cereal) foods, mostly wholegrain or high fibre cereal varieties
- vegetables, beans and legumes beans
- fruit
- milk, yoghurt, cheese or their alternatives, mostly reduced fat
- lean meat and poultry, fish, eggs, tofu, nuts and seeds, legumes and beans.
Water is the best choice for children and young people. Make sure tap water is clean, safe, free, always available and easy to access.
Amber – limit options
The weekly menu should have no more than 40% amber items.
Limit amber food and drinks offered to students by reducing the number of times offered each week.
Foods that are classified as amber have less nutritional benefit such as:
- some yoghurts
- lightly salted popcorn
- some homemade cakes and muffins.
Red 1 – limit to no more than 8 times a year, approximately twice per term
Red 1 food and drinks should not be provided to students in OSHC or vacation care, except up to 8 times per year. The timing of this is flexible to include vacation care planning.
This includes excursions, incursions, cooking sessions and the weekly menu.
Red 1 category items includes foods and drinks such as:
- hot dogs and frankfurts
- cakes, pastries and biscuits high in sugar and saturated fat
- some desserts, dairy desserts and iced confections
- fruit juices greater than 250mls or juices with added sugar.
Red 2 – food and drinks should not be supplied
Red 2 category foods should not be supplied to students in OSHC or vacation care.
Red 2 category items includes foods and drinks such as:
- certain sized biscuits, cakes, sweet and savoury pastries
- confectionery, including chocolate and fruit-based confectionery
- food and drinks with added sweeteners.
Applying the Right Bite standards in your OSHC service
Hear OSHC director Bec talk about practical ways she applied the Right Bite standards in her OSHC service.
Video transcript for applying the Right Bite standards in your OSHC service
Rebecca Vandermoer
So you might ask, how do I get started implementing these Right Bite
standards in the OSHC service.
Firstly, we worked with the school very closely, and then we spoke about it with all the other services within the area, we worked through it as a team in our service and worked through how we could implement it.
The best way to do it is one step at a time, one recipe at a time, one menu at a time. Review your menu and go through what wouldn't be in those standards.
How you can make different recipes 60/40. We changed over our margarine to Nuttelex, and we did like little things like that. Some things work, some things don't. Like, we tried Greek yogurt. The children hated it.
So you can do things like where you do half and half just to get them used to the new taste. All our cereals changed over and to start with, the children did not want to even go near them. They were like, “we want the old cornflakes back.” So it was just a matter of once they got used to it, if the staff are positive and the educators are positive with the children, they then get on board and it literally only took one or two weeks for the children to get on board.
Tips from what we've done in our service would be that we reviewed the menu first,
we put everything through the food checker, we then swapped over little things to start with, like we swapped over and Nuttelex, we swapped full cream milk to light milk, our tasty cheese to light cheese, those kinds of things.
So specifically, like menu items and recipes, we do pizzas now with the wholemeal muffins, the English muffins. We cut them in half. We make our homemade pizza sauce. We use light cheese and put vegetables on them, and then that fits into that 60/40 split for the children.
So the new red one limit of twice per term can be pretty tricky. So you can either do no red ones during the term and then you could do one per week in vacation care when you have the two week vacation care. You could do it for special events like, coming up, we have the Christmas markets where we will sell cupcakes. So that will be our one for the term.
So with the red one it can impact your cooking experiences and it is tricky to kind of get over that mindset of “we can't do it anymore,” but you can substitute little things like instead of choc chip muffins you can make banana muffins and things like that using wholemeal flour instead of the white flour.
Just little things like that. You still then can have those experiences for the children.
End of transcript.
Check your food and drink products and recipes
Wellbeing SA’s FoodChecker will help you assess the recipes and products that you offer. This will help you understand if they’re classified as green, amber or red.
You can also enter the details of your full weekly menu to generate a feedback report that can suggest improved products or recipe ingredients to move your menu closer to 60% green and 40% amber.
Improve your menu
To improve your OSHC or vacation care menu, you can:
- remove red items from your menu and reduce the frequency they are offered overall
- reduce the frequency and portion size of amber options
- increase the amount of green foods on your menu – this might include swapping meals or snacks to healthier options
- consider the cooking activities you do with students to incorporate green recipes and limit additional amber or red food and drinks being offered
- adjust recipes from red to amber and others from amber to green by changing or adding ingredients to your recipes
- take a look at these additional actions and tips for more ideas **wellbeing SA Links and titles pending**.
Promoting foods
The standards recommend that green category foods are promoted verbally and on menus, in newsletters and other communications, such as vacation care programs.
Red 1 or red 2 category foods should not be promoted or displayed. Marketing on catering equipment should not feature red 2 food and drinks.
Refer to promoting healthy eating in early childhood education and care services for more information.
Food safety
Food safety practices should adhere to current food safety legislation and advice.
Packaging and food waste
Food and beverage packaging, food waste and its disposal should adhere to school environmental policies and the South Australian single use plastic legislation. This includes switching from polystyrene products and some plastics such as straws and cutlery to reusable or plastic free compostable alternatives.
See packaging, single-use plastics and food waste in schools for more information.
