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‘Tell me about Turkey Twizzlers, Granny. Is it true that’s what you had for lunch at school? What part of the turkey did they come from?’

The next generation of children will grow up never having eaten the fowl product identified by Jamie Oliver as symbolic of everything that was wrong with school food. Now dinner ladies are offering organic chicken curry, homebaked bread and fresh fruit salad. But are the kids tucking in with gusto?

It’s undeniable that the TV series ‘Jamie’s School Dinners’, aired in early 2005, opened up not so much a can of worms as a freezerful of breaded poultry goo in twisted shapes. Oliver’s campaign to improve school dinners was partly responsible for shaming the government into taking remedial action. It pledged an immediate £280 million to be spent over three years on improving kitchens and on better ingredients. A year later, the education secretary Alan Johnson announced that ‘junk’ foods such as low-quality meat, crisps and chocolate would be banned from autumn 2006 and replaced with freshly cooked meals, vegetables and fruit. Fatty snacks and fizzy drinks have since been ejected in projectile fashion from many secondary school tuck shops and vending machines, too.
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As a result, for more than a year now schools and their cooks have had to produce more nutritious food for pupils. They’re spending more on it – up from a pitiful 37p per child to at least 50p, and often as much as 80p. From this year, another £240m is on offer to help schools cover the increased staff and ingredients costs. Yet although nobody can deny that school food is healthier than before, not everyone is impressed. Critics have been quick to wave a wooden spoon at the reforms and claim they aren’t working; the apocryphal tale of parents pushing chips and burgers through school railings has had a lot of mileage. Ridiculous though this practice may seeem, do the critics have a point? Are there drawbacks as well as advantages to the new world order?

The day's menu

For a start, Oliver’s campaign didn’t always help schools that were already serving decent food. ‘He created the assumption that all school meals were crap,’ says Mark Derrington, head of Grasmere Primary in Stoke Newington. The number of children eating school lunches at this school went down by 15-20 per cent after the TV programmes. A couple of years later, though, the numbers are up again to six out of ten. But, as at many schools, there are both stroppy parents who don’t want chips banned, and snotty parents who want their child only eating organic olives. Mark Derrington admits keeping up the standard, motivating dinner ladies and winning round kids and parents ‘takes an incredible amount of effort and energy. It’s relentless.’ But he concedes that it’s necessary.

Last autumn term, worrying figures suggested kids were voting with their trainers against the healthier meals. Compared to 2005, take-up of school meals had fallen 20 per cent in secondary schools and ten per cent in primaries. It prompted a chorus of told-you-sos from food manufacturers and opposition politicians. However, a survey last year by the School Food Trust, the body set up by the government to oversee school-meal reforms, found that more than 80 per cent of primary schools reported no change or an increase in take-up since the new standards came into force. And since then there will have been a further increase, since many London schools changed caterers in the autumn, as part of the drive to improve standards in the light of the new guidelines.

Across the London Borough of Islington, five per cent more children are eating a hot meal, following the arrival of new caterers. All meat and vegetables are delivered fresh to the school for the cooks to prepare, and 80p a head is being spent on ingredients. Cooks like Mary Dooley at Hanover Primary say they’ve never worked so hard in their lives.

Their efforts are not in vain. At Hanover Primary there is now a daily hot meat or fish dish, a vegetarian option, two veg and some carbohydrates on the side, plus salads, fruit and yoghurts, bread and a hot pudding. Children are natural grumblers, but most agree the food’s improved. A fussy few of those eligible for free school meals prefer to bring in packed lunches and the price of the school meal has risen to £1.70 a day, which may have discouraged a few parents, but Hanover head teacher Mandy Reese says: ‘the food is always nutritious and what the children want to eat.’

Colourful cabbage

Dee Russell, head of Wimbledon Park Primary School, shudders at the memory of the ‘disgusting smells that used to come down the corridor’. At one time only 40 children out of 360 were eating what the school provided – a testament to its poor quality. Since the arrival of a new caterer at the beginning of this school year, she’s has seen the number of children eating the healthy, mainly organic, lunches go up to 150. ‘Jamie Oliver was wonderful. He triggered it.’

Back in Islington, Thornhill Primary took matters into its own hands, kicking out the caterers last year and bringing in organic gastropub the Duke of Cambridge to help transform its meals. With a third of the children eligible for free meals, head teacher Matt Chappel has had to adjust his ambitions. ‘I wanted children to eat butternut squash risotto,’ he admits sheepishly – but the parents were as suspicious of dishes like this as the children were. The lunches cost £2 each. Chicken and eggs are free-range, the lamb is organic, the fish comes from sustainable sources and the bread is baked on the premises.

Head cook Caroline Moore appreciates cooking with ingredients like the organic beef from a Sussex farm – which the school hopes to visit as part of the Soil Association’s scheme to connect children with the source of their food. But Chappel has found providing vastly improved food less of a challenge than ‘moving the culture’. His aim is for 70 per cent of the children to have the dinners. Currently the figure is 56 per cent, up from 50 per cent. More children eating the meals means economies of scale that will help the food become better still. Chappel believes the improvements in meals make the children more sociable, improving the atmosphere in the playground afterwards. ‘My gut feeling is that concentration is better in the afternoons.’

Over trays of shepherd’s pie, sweetcorn and carrots and deliciously buttery and crunchy apple crumble with silky custard, some of Thornhill’s boys – the hardest nuts to crack when it comes to healthier eating – compare ‘before’ and ‘after’ dinners. Ten-year-old Ege and 11-year-old Charlie share omnivorous tastes, praising the roast chicken, lamb, beef stew and spaghetti – suggesting organic meat makes a big difference. ‘Some of the old meals I really liked,’ opines ten-year-old Nathan. Such as? ‘Chips. And curry, yeah, I like curry.’

Dishing up

Millfields Community School in Hackney won the 2006 Soil Association’s Food for Life School of the Year Award for its efforts into providing healthy and sustainable school meals and better education about food. The most popular dish at Millfields – both with kids and parents who come in for tastings on open evenings – is sweet potato and lentil korma. More than half the produce is organic, and the meals are extremely popular: of the 650 pupils, 65 per cent have lunch every day, and on Fridays that figure goes up to 80 per cent. Most of the 100 staff eat the school meals too. The kids pay only £1.45.

‘The dinners are lovely,’ chorus Louis and Oliver. Even an eight-year-old tucking into a packed lunch admitted, ‘I would get healthier food for school dinner.’

Dame Anna Hassan, the award-winning head of Millfields, is adamant that children should be properly fed. Sure, it takes persistence and education to change caterers’, children’s, even teachers’ attitudes to food, but what’s amazing is how much good work is going on, and that the phrase ‘food culture’ is part of the school vocabulary. Primary schools are well on their way to feeding children better. Then, as Dame Hassan says, ‘as our children go through into secondary school it will make a difference there.’ They won’t have tried a Turkey Twizzler – and they will have a taste for good healthy food.