As of this week, the government is on a mission to tackle obesity. But school meals, instead of helping with this, are part of the problem.

This is not a Jamie Oliver issue: the quality of school meals is fine. There are no more turkey twizzlers being served. But, while the quality of the food has gone up, the budget has remained the same. And so, inevitably, the amount of food has gone down. You’d get more turkey twizzlers for your lunch than you would organic tuna.

As a result, what the children are getting at school isn’t helping to combat obesity. In fact, it’s the opposite: it’s not providing them with enough food. There’s no way they can have their main meal at lunchtime and a light meal in the evening. That’s just impossible on the existing budget.

So, either they’re getting a second hot meal in the evening, or they’re not getting a nutritious meal at all, and are just filling up on takeaways or whatever.

Coronavirus: Restrictions on school meals

This really hit home this year, with all the restrictions around the coronavirus. Come September, it will be almost impossible to run a school dining hall. Or, at least, it will be almost impossible to run a school dining hall in compliance with government regulations.

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, there’s the cleaning regime. You’d need to be 100 per cent convinced that the area where a child sat was specific to that child, specific to their bubble, and that there was no risk of cross-contamination.

Time is always of the essence during school lunchtimes: getting children in and out quickly, especially the little ones. To get the pupils in and out, and to do the cleaning you’d need, to the level you’d need, you’d be looking at a four-hour lunchtime.

So the alternative is that children eat in their classrooms. We did this for a few weeks, before the end of term, and the pupils really enjoyed eating in their classrooms with their teachers; having the opportunity to chat with their teachers in an informal way. Then we’d give the teachers a separate one-hour lunch break afterwards.

This led to a second decision: do we serve hot meals or cold meals? Because of the smell - can you imagine trying to teach in a classroom where there’s mince on the floor? - we decided on cold meals.

The impossibility of a decent lunch

So we had to try to design a much better cold lunch for our chlidren: a healthy and wholesome cold meal, within the restrictions of the catering contractors. And that’s where we hit the problem.

Our school meals cost £2.30, which is pretty standard. Out of that, the catering contractor has to pay staff and overheads, and make its own profit. So we have around 80p to spend on each child.

But the further issue is that the contractor has contracts with its own wholesalers. The price that a school cook pays for a tin of beans doesn’t bear any relation to the cost you might pay for a tin of beans from, say, Aldi or Lidl.

As a result, it’s almost impossible to make a decent lunch to the quantities we need, while being compliant with the government guidelines.

For example, I wanted a lunch of: one sandwich, with bread or rolls cooked (or heated) on the premises, with cheese or ham or tuna (organic or sustainably sourced); one savoury product, such as hummus, pitta chips or mini sausage rolls; cucumber or carrot slices; apple slices; a small cake. That doesn’t sound like a lot of food to me.

The caterer said to us that it would be totally impossible to do that. They just said, flat out, that’s not possible. They came back to me with a menu that cost 40p or 50p more per child. The menu still wasn’t what I wanted it to be, but it went somewhere towards it.

Solving the obesity crisis

A lot of headteachers are concerned about the quantity of school food on offer. So they’re then supplementing the meals with extra bread, in order to bulk it out. (Some do offer extra salad. But, in a primary school, an awful lot of pupils won’t eat salad, and then it just goes to waste.)

Meanwhile, the standard of packed lunches is really, really poor. Parents are essentially going to Tesco Express on the way to school, and buying a DairyLea Lunchable, a Frube, a packet of crisps and a fruit tube.

I want to produce a packed lunch that’s better value than what Tesco can sell. I think that’s just a given. This shouldn’t even be up for debate if we want to solve the obesity crisis.

The government has all these high-minded ideals and lofty aspirations, but the way that filters down to school level and child level is completely different. The government is setting an ideal, and then school lunches are - through no fault of the school - undermining that ideal.

We need to change this. If we could only get this right, it would be absolutely transformative.

The author is the headteacher of a primary school in the North of England