A Study on Allocation of Nutrition Teachers and School Dietitians:

Focusing on School-lunch Preparation

Abstract

　Nutrition teachers (NTs) don't just manage school lunches; they also serve a critical role in responding to the health problems of individual children. However, mandatory requirements have not been established at each school because the standard number of NTs and school dietitians (SDs) defined in the Act on Standards for Class Formation and Fixed Number of School Personnel of Public Compulsory Education Schools is low. This paper aims to clarify the status and challenges of NTs and SDs by retallying the results of public surveys and creating a summary of the changes over time. It also seeks to determine why the rate of allocation for NTs and SDs has remained low by closely examining how school lunches are prepared. The results revealed that, despite some issues with the existing legal framework, each municipality has striven to assign NTs. Nevertheless, the way that school lunches are prepared has had a limiting effect on the allocation of NTs. Municipalities such as Chiba Prefecture that contain a large number of schools which independently implement their school lunches have appointed many municipality-funded school dietitian, so there is no opportunity to transition to NTs, which keeps their numbers low. Improving the central government's standards for allocating such staff is the most effective method of dealing with this. Creating chances to switch from municipality-funded school dietitian to NTs and increasing the number of new NT hires is also effective.