The year 5 children at Kintbury St Mary's primary school were very satisfied with their lunch: vegetable soup with a bread roll, toad in the hole and carrot cake. As well they might be, because they cooked it all themselves. Katy, 10, especially enjoyed the carrot cake, which she'd made before, but only out of a packet. Now she could show her mum how to make it from scratch.
It was Katy's first session on the cooking bus, which travels the country's schools for hands-on cooking sessions as part of the Focus on Food campaign, sponsored by Waitrose. The bus was at Kintbury St Mary's at the invitation of the head, Barbara O'Dwyer, who is passionate about creating an appetite for healthy eating in the 170 pupils at her village school near Hungerford in Berkshire. Easy when you've got a glamorous pantechnicon parked in the playground, but this isn't just a flash in the pan. O'Dwyer's commitment reaches every corner of the school.
Dr Mary Rudolf would give full marks to this "whole-school" approach. She is the Leeds paediatrician behind the NHS's first clinic to treat children suffering from obesity, the fastest-growing health epidemic. One in five under-fives is overweight and 300,000 children are obese, facing not only bullying and teasing, which can have devastating effects on their self-esteem, but also life-threatening diseases such as diabetes and kidney failure. Along with cardiovascular diseases and some forms of cancer, it is the latest diet- and lifestyle-related disease to become a potential major killer.
How schools nurture our children's appetites is a key tactic in fighting the new flab. Britain's 7.5 million schoolgoers are a captive market for caterers who pocket £1bn a year from sales of food and drink, while spending on average only about 40p-50p on the ingredients of a school dinner. Shop-owners trouser another £433m from crisps, sweets, fizzy drinks and cigarettes that children buy on their way to and from school.
A survey by the Local Authority Caterers' Association, whose members dish up most school food, found that 22% of parents rely on a school meal to provide nutritional balance and 60% said the school meal played a vital role in their children's diet. Yet until last year cooks could put whatever they liked into school dinners, and practical cookery lessons are falling off the menu. Millions of children have not only been ill fed at school, but also at home by parents who don't know what a well balanced meal is, let alone how to cook one.
While there are several New Labour initiatives to promote healthy eating at school, they are about as joined up as a five-year-old's handwriting. The most important was probably the setting of statutory nutritional standards for school caterers in 2001, for the first time in 20 years. There are also breakfast clubs, a free fruit scheme for four- to six-year-olds, healthy tuck shops, improved access to drinking water, and free milk for under fives. Across the board, the National Healthy School Standard encourages lifestyle-improving programmes.
Without the commitment of heads such as Barbara O'Dwyer, however, they may all add up to little. While many doctors - and teachers - say it's parents who are to blame for bad eating habits, and others argue that marketeers who play on children's desires are the culprits, she believes the answer lies with the children. "I never suggest to parents what they should or shouldn't let their children eat at school," she says, "and we never talk to the children about what's bad for them. The emphasis is all on healthy eating."
While the vegetable soup was going down a treat on the cooking bus, the other pupils were eating in the canteen, as usual. The menus are devised by the local authority's catering company, so O'Dwyer and her cook, Sharon Black, don't hold much sway there. What they can do, however, is encourage the children to choose well.
Unusually for a primary head, O'Dwyer has created a mini-kitchen with a cooker and fridge in the library. (And talking of the library, the week the cooking bus visited was dedicated to reading about food, from Dickens to The Very Hungry Caterpillar.)
The kitchen is not just dedicated to food technology. Amber, aged 10, said the best science lesson she ever had was when they learnt about heating and cooling materials by making chocolate crispy cakes, while her classmates enjoyed attempting eggless sponge when studying the second world war. Year 6 used the cooking-bus visit as the inspiration for journalistic reporting as part of the English curriculum.
It all seems to be paying off. "I inherited a culture of crisps when I arrived two years ago," says O'Dwyer. "The playground at break was full of children eating them." Now the pupil-run tuck shop often runs out of apples and raisins. "Even the children who have packed lunches bring more fruit and yoghurt," says Sharon Black.
Persuading younger children to give up crisps for raw carrots is all very well, but what about teenagers? David Page, deputy head of Severn Vale, a 1,000-plus comprehensive with a very mixed intake on the edge of Gloucester, thinks positive. His school has contracted out of local authority meals provision and hired its own caterer, Sodexho. About 65% of pupils have school meals - well above average, although no one seems to collate precise figures nationwide.
"We formed a healthy lifestyles committee, which includes pupils from each year group. Their suggestions have led to more baked potatoes, salads and theme days, the most recent being Caribbean," he explains.
Survey after survey shows that it's not just the food that puts pupils off. Why put up with long queues and messy, noisy eating areas when you can nip out for a bag of chips? At Severn Vale they killed two birds with one stone by providing baguettes with healthy fillings that can be ordered at morning break to save waiting.
Like Barbara O'Dwyer, David Page doesn't believe healthy eating stops at lunchtime. Vending machines are restricted to drinks and chocolate bars with the fewest additives. There's a breakfast club, and Alison Montgomery, chief dietician at Sodexho, takes assemblies at which she talks about how breakfast helps concentration, and about eating five portions of fruit and veg a day. The food technology teacher cooks some of the dishes from the lunchtime menu with students so that they understand their nutritional components.
Kintbury St Mary's and Severn are ordinary schools that excel in teaching children how to eat well, and while there are many more, not all heads are so enthusiastic. With the focus on equating success solely with academic performance, perhaps that is hardly surprising. "Some heads say 'What are school dinners to do with me?' but if you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out," argues Montgomery. She sits on the steering committee that is monitoring nutritional standards, and believes Ofsted should include food as part of its remit. "A school failing its inspection on catering would send out the right message," she says. "For me it can't come soon enough."
On the menu at Kintbury
About one-third of pupils have a school meal at Kintbury, at a cost of £1.35 a head.
Main course Turkey pie with gravy, or vegetarian sausages with gravy, served with parsley potatoes, home-made bread, carrots and peas.
Dessert Chocolate sponge and chocolate custard, or fruit yoghurt, or fresh fruit.
Yum! Most popular meal is a roast dinner, chips (served only on Fridays) and, in the summer, picnic packs.
Yuk! Shepherd's pie, macaroni cheese and spicy bean casserole don't go down so well.
The best-fed school?
How about Bombay fish balls served in a tomato and garlic sauce on rice, followed by raspberry puff slice for lunch? Or perhaps you'd prefer Creole jambayala with chicken, prawns, peppers and allspice, served with potatoes and vegetables of the day, followed by cream caramel, for £1.35 all in. Impossible? Not at Torquay Boys' Grammar school in Devon, where these are just two examples of the healthy eating option available each day. If you are more of a sausage and chips man, go ahead, but they come with a health warning, because all the lunchtime choices at TGBS are graded and the more healthy choices you make, the more points you collect to trade in for vouchers at WH Smith.
TBGS is a leading example of how the "whole school" approach can work. Peter Hewitt, the deputy head, says the work of its School Nutrition Action Group has been fundamental in bring ing together staff, the catering company, health advisers, parents and, crucially, the pupils themselves. "And if the headteacher isn't committed across the curriculum, you can kiss the whole thing goodbye," he says. So a geography lesson might discuss food miles (the distance travelled by a commodity on the way to the shop shelf) and countries of origin, and a street dance session will tackle calorie burning. Whole days are devoted to food-related topics: earlier this year, for example, local producers such as organic suppliers Riverford Farm and special interest groups including Fair Trade were invited to the school for a "Food for Life Extravaganza".
The efforts have paid off handsomely, not only in the very high uptake of schools meals at about 70%, but with several awards that the school has won for the promotion of healthy eating and the contribution of its expertise to Beacon Status.
