Schools dinners aren't what's making children fat

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We're off again in the latest piece of ill-informed nannying fussbucketry about schools dinners.

Education secretary Michael Gove will unveil a crackdown on fatty and sweet foods on Tuesday as part of new standards on school meals.

Milk must also be available to primary and secondary pupils during the school day under the new rules which come into force in January.

Pupils will only be offered two portions of deep-fried, battered and breadcrumb-coated foods each week under the rules outlined by Gove.

Pastry-based dishes will be subject to the same restrictions, schools will be completely banned from offering chocolate and confectionery in canteens and tuck shops, and salt will not be available for pupils to add to food after it is cooked.

This is a compete triumph for the worrywarts at the School Food Trust as a bunch of professional health fascists get to determine the menu for school dinners. And the saddest part of this is that all this unjustified interference won't make the slightest jot of difference to levels of obesity in children. I know this because it's not the school dinners that make the children fat, it's all the stuff they cram in their mouths during the rest of the day. No, not fast food but crisps, sweets, cakes - the contents of Mum's cupboard - that is the problem (and I'm accepting the 'official' view that childhood obesity is at 'epidemic' levels despite the rates actually falling).

Children are fed just one meal each day by the school. And the contents of that meal (assuming it's not actively poisonous) is, if children are eating three meals each day, less than a quarter of the food those children eat. Not a single child will get slimmer because of this intervention and some may, as the dinner becomes less calorific, actually suffer because that calorie rich dinner is the only decent meal they'll get that day.

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Lunch box fussbucketry doesn't work! Fact.

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Today we've been inundated with the proposals to ban children having packed lunches:

Packed lunches could be banned and pupils barred from leaving school during breaks to buy junk food under a government plan to increase the take-up of school meals, which is to be announced on Friday.

The plan, drawn up by John Vincent and Henry Dimbleby, the founders of the food company Leon, aims to tackle the poor public image of school meals.

Now leaving aside the crassly illiberal nature of these proposals, we should note that this simply doesn't work as a strategy for improving child nutrition. How do we know this? Because, as Carl Minns points out, Hull City Council did just this by combining universal free lunches with draconian policing of the lunch box. And they asked Hull University to evaluate the effect. And they found:

The free healthy school dinners were not having the desired effect of improving children’s nutritional intake, children chose to eat the foods they liked and left the rest. Children who ate a free healthy school dinner went on to consume foods high in energy, fat, NME sugar and sodium later in the day and overall did not have a lower intake of these macronutrients than those children who had a packed lunch.

For adherents to the church of public health the proposals look good, sound good and get squealingly positive responses from sofa-bound BBC TV presenters. The problem is that - like most public health gimmicks they don't work.

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School dinners - why don't children eat them?

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I'm told* (and it can be checked so is probably true) that Bradford is in the "top quartile" for performance on free school meal take up.

For the record 88.5% of eligible primary and 85.4% of secondary pupils received their free dinners. This is better than the national and regional average and seems pretty good until you say that about 1 in 9 of entitled primary kids and 3 in 20 of similar secondary children aren't getting - claiming - their free dinner.

One wonders why? Is it peer pressure? Parental incompetence? Impenetrable bureaucracy?

More to the point why don't more parents insist on their children getting school meals? Here in Bradford the cost is very reasonable - £1.50 per meal in primary and £2.15 per meal secondary. That's a main meal for five days in school time for less than £11 and a mere £7.50 if the child's under eleven.

Yet less that 60% of primary and less that 40% of secondary children in Bradford don't take school dinners!

They can't be that awful can they?

*Note: the figures here come from a briefing on the school meal service that I received recently

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