Participatory Management and School Feeding in Early Childhood Education: Diagnosis and Expert Appraisal of a Proposal in Tarapoto, Peru

Abstract

School feeding programmes encompass food provision, family engagement, and nutrition education. This study aimed to characterise parental perceptions of participatory management and the food service and educational components of school feeding, and to develop a management proposal for expert appraisal. An applied, quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional study with a descriptive and proposal-oriented design was conducted at an early childhood education institution in Tarapoto, Peru, in 2025. The study included all 147 parents identified in the institutional census of classrooms serving children aged 3–5 years. Two 16-item Likert-type questionnaires were administered; Cronbach’s alpha coefficients in a pilot study were 0.813 and 0.808. Frequencies and percentages were calculated using SPSS version 25. Participatory management was rated at a moderate level by 59.2% of respondents, while 62.6% assigned the same rating to the assessed food service and educational components. In addition, 27.9% reported receiving no training in healthy eating practices, and 35.4% reported receiving no technical support for food preparation. The proposed model incorporated participation, consensus-building, community oversight, and nutrition education. Five experts awarded a combined score of 396 out of 405 points (97.8%). The findings describe parental perceptions; the proposal’s effectiveness remains to be evaluated after implementation.