Award Winning Activism: Elsie's Journey

At Bite Back, we work with secondary schools across England through our fully funded programme, empowering students in Years 7 to 10 to uncover the problems and injustices within our food system.

Through inspiring assemblies, eye-opening sessions, and student-led investigations, young people design and deliver a social action project to transform their school environment — putting healthy food in the spotlight. As a result, they help increase the availability of affordable, nutritious options in their school canteens.

Elsie’s journey began in 2023 when her school joined the Bite Back in Schools Programme, and she proudly stepped up as one of our dedicated School Food Champions. At their very first meeting, the group came together around a shared belief: school should be a place where every child can thrive with access to decent, nutritious food.

Together with her classmates and school staff, including their supportive teacher, Mr Gardiner, they worked tirelessly to address the pressing issues surrounding school food. Through their campaign, they raised awareness and created tangible change, engaging over 1,000 students and collaborating with senior school leaders. Thanks to her tireless efforts in school and the success of their campaign, Elsie — alongside fellow School Food Champions George and Esme — was honoured with the Sustain Children's Food Young Changemaker Award!

Elsie's story is a testament to the power of youth-led action and the positive impact that schools can have in shaping the future of food. In this blog, Elsie shares her journey from School Food Champion to Children's Food Winner.

Elsie’s Story

Hi, my name is Elsie. This is my blog about my experience with Bite Back and going from an assembly to an award winner at the Children’s Food Awards 2025.

At the start of Year 9, my teacher, Mr Gardiner, organised an enrichment day for our year group and it was all about injustices in the food system. We also had an assembly as part of the day, and I was introduced to Bite Back. The activities that day were really eye-opening and it was something that I wanted to be involved with straight away.

So, that was the start of my journey. After those initial activities, Mr Gardiner asked that students who wanted to be involved in the scheme should apply to become a School Food Champion. From then on we met weekly as a team with Mr Gardiner to work through the project and ultimately towards a campaign.

My Penny Drop Moment

I quickly became aware of how bad the quality of school food was, and how much junk food was being served. It’s always been there, but I’d never stopped to notice it. One thing that shocked me was how rigid the school portions have to be and how closely monitored this is by the catering companies. It was really hard to understand why they had to be so inadequate, but also how the serving ladies felt like their hands were tied because of such rules.

To make better school food for all, more variety needs to be added, and healthier options need to be enticing. Quite often the better alternatives just aren’t very appealing, so more effort needs to go into those items if they’re to become a more popular choice on the menu. The perfect school food environment would be calm, clean, tasty and organised — a place that staff and students are proud of and actively want to eat in.

Putting Our Plan Into Action

The campaign days were probably the most challenging, but they were also my favourite part of the project. As much as I enjoyed the planning phase, nothing beats seeing it all come together and having that feeling that it was all worth it in the end.

Although we’d prepared as well as we could have done, it’s hard to know whether the engagement will be there or just how busy we’ll be. We delivered our project over three campaign days — and it was a lot! On the third day, we prepared over 500 samples of healthy food in just 90 minutes — that was definitely the most stressful moment of the whole campaign! However, once we’d split ourselves into teams in the kitchen and got a bit of a system going, it became a lot easier to manage. But it was certainly the first time we had all probably felt pressure like that before.

The student reaction in our school has been amazing! Over the three days we had over 1000 student engagements, which made us realise that this was something other people cared about. Not only that, but it allowed us to collaborate more with staff, particularly our headteacher, Mr Nixon, who has been very supportive of our work. We also met with canteen staff and wider senior figures from our school’s academy chain who were keen to hear our views on the quality of school food.

Becoming An Award Winner

To win the Young Changemaker award was like a fever dream; it’s just not the sort of thing you ever expect! The response at home and school has been brilliant. We’re a small school in East Yorkshire, and then all of a sudden we’re heading down to London for a national awards ceremony – it’s great!

Off the back of the award win I’m pleased to say that my school’s academy trust members have invited me to be involved in the selection of the new school caterers in September. It makes me feel like my work will continue and not end with one campaign.

Now we know what it feels like and what can be done, I’d love to try and support other schools to create the same kind of change. For my fellow School Food Champions and I, our dream would be a law on school food for real change, change that lasts, especially around the school food standards.

Young people are always told they can make change, they can make a difference, but I’m not sure you always get to see the end goal or result. Bite Back has allowed me to see that change, and continue to see it next year in my final year of school. That makes me really proud of the work we’ve done.