The principal who found that the canteen contract was a health decision

The principal signs for the food before she signs for anything else

Nine hundred children, fifty-three teaching and non-teaching staff, an aided school in Panaji that runs from the pre-primary block through to the higher secondary section. Sister Agnes Fernandes has been in school leadership for eighteen years, and the food decisions reach her desk in a steady line that nobody has ever described to her as food decisions.

The canteen contract comes up for renewal and is settled on rate, reliability and whether last year's contractor caused any trouble. The cooked meal for the primary section arrives daily and the register has to be signed. Somebody has to decide whether the vendor outside the gate, who sells to the children at dispersal through the railings, is the school's business or the municipality's. The drinking water arrangement has to be inspected before the monsoon and again after it. On health check day a visiting doctor works through the classes and the cards come back to the office. On Wednesday the senior girls are given the weekly iron and folic acid tablet, and twice a year the deworming round is run. Parents send notes about tiffin. Class teachers send notes about children who have stopped eating lunch.

Every one of those is a decision about what nine hundred growing people put in their bodies, and every one of them was being taken on administrative instinct.

The four decisions that are hers alone

Some of this genuinely belongs to other people. Teaching belongs to teachers, the meal scheme has its own rules, and medical matters belong to doctors. But four things in that list are the principal's and nobody else's, and she noticed it late.

What the canteen is permitted to sell. Whether the school has a written food policy or merely a set of habits. Which outside body is allowed through the gate to run a workshop, a camp or a screening for the children. And what happens to a child whose growth record or whose behaviour at lunch suggests something is wrong.

The three conversations that exposed the gap

The canteen tender

The tender process rewards the bidder who offers the school the best terms, and the bidder makes his margin on the items children buy on impulse. A canteen list built that way is predictable: fried, salty, sweet, bought with the ten rupees a child has in a pocket. Sister Agnes had asked contractors to include healthier options for years, and had watched those options appear on the list, sit uneaten, and quietly disappear by the second term. She had no way to specify what she wanted, no way to cost it, and therefore no way to hold anybody to it. Asking for healthy food is a wish. Writing it into a schedule of the contract is an instruction.

The mother who wanted her daughter put on a diet

The request arrives several times a year and it is never simple. A mother of a Class 9 girl wants the school to stop her daughter buying from the canteen, to put her in an extra games period, and to speak to her about her weight. On the other side of the same week, a class teacher reports that a Class 11 girl has been skipping lunch since the start of term, exercises through the break, and has become withdrawn. Two requests about food and adolescent girls, pointing in opposite directions, and a principal with no training to tell her which one is the emergency.

The company that offered a free nutrition workshop

Brands approach schools continually and the offer is always generous in shape. A free health camp with height and weight screening for every child. A nutrition workshop by a company nutritionist. Free samples of a malted drink for the primary section and a chart for the notice board. Sister Agnes had refused several of these out of instinct and accepted one or two out of politeness, and could not have explained the difference between the two categories to her management committee.

Where school leadership training stops

A career through a bachelor's and master's in education and into headship covers a great deal and covers it seriously: pedagogy, evaluation, school administration, finance and audit, board compliance, child protection, inclusive education, staff management. School health appears in that structure as an administrative duty, which is to say a checklist of camps to be organised and registers to be signed.

Nothing in it teaches what an adolescent actually needs to eat, or why the iron tablet handed out on Wednesday is undone by the tea the girls drink straight after lunch, or what the difference is between a child who is heavy and healthy and a child who is heading for trouble, or how to recognise the point at which a girl's eating has become a psychiatric matter rather than a dietary one.

The result is a head of school making food decisions from personal judgement, which in most Indian schools means the decisions are taken by the canteen contractor's margin and by whichever parent complained most recently.

What the diploma changed about the school

The canteen contract acquired a schedule

The single most useful change was a document. The renewed contract now carries an annexe listing what may be sold, what may not, what has to be available every day, and the price band the school expects, written in terms a contractor can cost. The restrictions on selling high fat, sugar and salt items in a school canteen are law rather than the principal's preference, which makes the conversation shorter, but the replacement list is the part that took training to write, because it has to be food that children will actually buy at eleven o'clock in a Goan September.

The school wrote down a food policy

Two pages, approved by the management committee, covering what the canteen sells, what the gate vendor situation is, the rule on birthday and celebration food, the rule that food is never used as a punishment or a reward in any classroom, the drinking water arrangement and the length of the lunch break. That last item mattered more than anyone expected. A lunch break too short to eat in produces children who eat half a box and buy something on the way home, and no amount of advice to parents fixes a timetable problem.

Teachers were briefed instead of instructed

The staff who deliver the iron tablet, supervise lunch and notice a child who has stopped eating now get a short annual briefing with content in it: why the tablet is given weekly, what to say to a child who resists it, why it should not be handed out with tea, what to look for in a child whose lunch box is coming back full, and precisely what a teacher does next. The instruction that used to reach them was a circular. What reaches them now is a reason.

The offers from outside the gate get answered properly

A brand-run screening camp sorts a school's children by body size on a company's behalf and hands the school nothing it can use. A workshop delivered by somebody employed to sell a product is advertising with a lanyard on. Sister Agnes now declines both with a reason she can put in writing to her committee, and accepts what is genuinely useful: the government health programme, a qualified speaker with no product behind her, and a parent session the school itself runs.

The staff room, which nobody plans for

Fifty-three adults spend their working lives in that building, drink institutional tea with sugar in it several times a day, sit for most of the day and eat whatever the canteen has left over. Several are on medication for blood pressure and a few for diabetes. A school has no obligation to run staff wellness and very few do it. The training gave Sister Agnes the confidence to put something modest in place: the tea trolley changed, a properly organised annual check rather than a token one, and walking permitted in the corridors during free periods without it being treated as odd. It is not a health programme. It is the acknowledgement that a school is also a workplace with fifty-three people's health inside it.

Studying eighteen years into a career

A principal's day has no gaps in it, but it has a shape: the academic year in Goa ends in April and the school is quiet through May, and the monsoon weeks bring their own kind of enforced indoor time. NNWA's Diploma in Nutrition, Dietetics & Public Health is six months at twenty nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine rupees, six hundred hours at NCrF and NSQF Level 4, awarded jointly with Medhavi Skills University, Sikkim, which is recognised under section 2(f) of the UGC Act 1956 and approved by NCVET as an Awarding Body under its 2021 state Act, so the MSU Certificate for Skill Competency comes alongside the NNWA one.

Classes are live in English and Hindi and all of them are recorded with lifetime access, which is the only way a head of school gets through a course during a term. Sister Agnes added Child & Adolescent Nutrition, which matches the age range of the senior school, and Public Health Nutrition, which explains the schemes the school is already inside. Child Nutrition came last, for the pre-primary block.

What a school must not do

A school does not run a weight-loss programme for children, and it does not sort children by body size. Screening that labels children, weighing in front of a class, a public chart, a special group for the heavier pupils: all of it does damage that lasts longer than the problem it was meant to address, and adolescents in particular carry that damage for years.

A school does not diagnose, and a principal with a nutrition qualification least of all, because her authority makes an off-hand judgement heavier. Growth records, a health card and a teacher's observation exist so that a family can be asked to see a doctor. That is where they end.

Disordered eating is not a nutrition matter for a school to manage. A child restricting food, exercising compulsively or vomiting after meals needs a specialist team with the family involved, reached quickly and discreetly, with the school's role being to notice, to protect the child's privacy and to support whatever treatment is decided.

And the school cannot replace the household. What a principal controls is the canteen, the policy, the timetable, the water, the briefing and the gate. That is a considerable amount, which is the argument for doing it knowledgeably, and it is not the same thing as deciding what any individual child eats.