Editor: It’s vital our children get the nutrition they need from school meals

Add to that luncheon meat, ravioli, or sausage rolls with mashed potatoes, peas and a helping of beans. Delicious, or a taste of your younger life you’d rather forget?

It all seems very different to the story featured on the opposite page of today’s Star. How things have changed.

The panini served up at Hinde House could certainly do with the more generous helping the dinner ladies at my school used to put on our plates.

The catering firm is right to apologise and look into how that standard of food made it into pupils’ hands. It’s been proven as vital to children’s education that they get good quality food – and enough of it to feed their learning.

One secondary school in Sheffield has taken the decision to ban packed lunches, using its own chef to serve a meat-free menu and ensure pupils get the quality of food they need.

Its website states ‘pupils need highly nutritious food that provides them with the energy needed to sustain high levels of performance’.

It seems a while now since Jamie Oliver campaigned to improve meals as part of the Jamie's School Dinners television programme and we saw pictures of parents feeding chips to pupils through school railings.

But following his work and moves by the government, it was shown that in schools where changes were brought in, test results improved for many pupils.

And Bake-Off’s Prue Leith called a few years ago for a ban on what she saw as largely unhealthy packed lunches and for more teaching on how to cook. She even visited that same Sheffield ‘meat-free’ secondary school to find out how they were doing things.

With levels of obesity being way too high and youngsters – as ever – eating unhealthy meals, it’s vital that our children have the nutrition they need, and the right quantities of it.

Schools, catering companies and our city council have got to make sure that pupils get the best start in life from a learning point of view but also in terms of what is put on their plates – or in their paninis.