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Chapter one Introduction
Background
1.1 Many people in Scotland face serious health risks because they do not eat a healthy diet and because they are not active enough. As part of the wider policy framework for improving Scotland's health, the Scottish Executive is developing proposals for legislation to improve the diets and good health in general of Scotland's school children. The legislation will help to improve the health of young people in Scotland by ensuring that food and drinks supplied in schools are healthy and by ensuring that all local authority schools are health promoting environments. Strategies to improve the health of children and young people have been particularly well received and are being implemented across Scotland. The proposed Schools (Nutrition and Health Promotion) (Scotland) Bill will ensure that practice is brought up to a uniformly high standard across the country.
1.2 A consultation on the proposed legislation was launched on 4 May and ran until 31 July 2006. The consultation process sought views on the elements and implications of the proposed legislation, these being:
- a duty being placed upon local authorities to ensure that food and drinks which they provide in schools, including nurseries, meet defined nutrient standards
- setting defined nutrient standards for food and drinks arranged or funded by local authorities for children attending independent schools
- a duty being placed on local authorities to promote the uptake of school meals in their schools, including free school meals
- a duty being placed upon local authorities to ensure that those taking free school meals can do so anonymously, as far as practicable
- a power for local authorities to provide children in local authority schools with free drinks, fruit, vegetables, bread or cereal based snacks which meet defined nutrient standards
- a duty being placed upon Scottish Ministers and local authorities to endeavour to ensure that all local authority schools are health promoting schools.
1.3 The consultation process also sought any other views on any aspect of the consultation.
1.4 The consultation document, available on the Scottish Executive website ( www.scotland.gov.uk/consultations) comprised 7 questions, 6 of which were closed (yes/no responses), although respondents were asked to comment if they wished. Key stakeholder groups were sent a copy of the document directly. In addition, a number of consultation events were organised by partners and stakeholders and combined responses were received from these.
Research Objectives
1.5 The objectives of the analysis of the responses are:
- to analyse the written responses (paper and electronic) to the consultation document
- to produce a database (in Excel) of responses to enable analysis to be made by question or respondent group as appropriate
- to identify the main interest groups responding to the consultation and groups where the response has been low
- to carry out an analysis of responses by question and respondent
- to identify how many respondents support or oppose the proposals, including analysing by respondent group
- to identify common themes that emerge during the analysis
- to highlight contradictions and anomalies that emerge during the analysis
- to incorporate any comments on the consultation process into the analysis report.
Methodology
1.6 The method of analysing the results involved a number of stages:
- responses were coded to establish whether respondents wished themselves and/or their views to be treated in confidence
- each respondent was allocated to a respondent category to allow responses to be analysed by different groupings of stakeholders. A listing of these categories and the organisations, groups or individuals that are contained within them may be found as Annex 1
- all data was entered to an Access database. Closed questions were allocated yes/no response codes and open text responses were allocated codes to define common categories of issues raised between respondents
- where no response was given to a yes/no question, support or opposition to the proposal was established from any additional comments made and then only where those comments clearly made it possible to identify support or opposition. Where that was not possible the response was coded under the final 'any other comments' question
- in addition to establishing support or opposition to particular elements of the proposed legislation, an additional code was allocated to assess whether consultation responses were generally negative, positive or neutral in their views of the proposed legislation overall.
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