Parents and school involvement
Programme coordinators believe that parents need to be more involved in lesson planning and teaching. Also, it was recommended that school principals follow-up on all classroom lessons. During the intervention, some schools struggled to engage parents in the intervention as they had very busy schedules. It was suggested that moving forward, online meetings and digital tools could be offered to increase parent engagement in the programme. Parents were engaged and interested in building the habit of healthy eating in their kids’ lifestyle and many of them adopted healthy habits at home and changed some unhealthy behaviours after attending the introductory meeting and engaged in the parents’ open days. It is believed that engaging parents in the practical component of the intervention increased self-confidence among students. The family section of implementation was easy; however, in some schools, it was hard to keep parents enrolled and engaged due to parents’ motivation and school operations. Accordingly, some schools implemented motivational incentives such as giving parents and students tokens of appreciation and inviting them to take part in practical activities, which promoted a holistic approach to healthy eating mainly on the individual level, the school-level and at home.