Sweden may be best known for Abba and Finland for Nokia mobile phones, but of course, there's a lot more to both countries than this, as I recently discovered.
It's often said that in order to really understand your own country, it's useful to travel to other countries. When I returned from a visit to Scandanavia last week, I must say that I felt this sense of seeing Wales anew and thinking about how some of the programmes that I had seen abroad could be adopted here.
I was visiting Sweden and Finland with the Public Administration Select Committee, looking a public services and the civil service in both counytries. Visits like this not only build links between parliamentarians, but can also give us fresh ideas on how to do things more effectively here.
One of the highlights of the visit for me was visiting schools in both countries and, in particular, sampling the school dinners. With Jamie's School Dinners, this has, of course, become a hot topic in our own country.
What impressed me most was the quality of the food and the way it was served up in schools. In Stockholm, the children had a choice between meat or vegetarian meals - they could, for example, have chilli con carne or vegetarian chilli con carne with rice, salad, grated cheese and a yoghurt salad dressing. The drink available was iced water.
In Helsinki, the choice was between vegetables and rice and macaroni and cheese with salad. The drinks abailable were water or milk. There wasn't a chip in sight.
Everyone could have as much as they liked and there were no extra temptations. There were no salty snacks or sugary drinks available. The dinners were also free.
I know that we have made great progress in school meals in Wales, but in Cardiff children can still choose crisps, cookies, chips and sugared drinks. It's harder for them to make healthy choices.
I think we could learn a lot from Sweden and Finland in this respect. Finland, in particular, has had amazing success in improving the health of its population through promoting healthy diet and exercise and I know the Welsh Assembly Government has learnt from what has been achieved there. Thirty years ago, Finland had the highest number of deaths in the world from heart disease, but since then, it has cut the death rate from heart disease amongst men by 75%.
The high standards in the schools in Scandanavia seems very much a recipe for success.
Of course, Wales is not Sweden or Finland, but we can learn from them and we can perhaps move away from our "chips with everything" mentality - especially in our schools. |
