“Perhaps we should all have done something a long time ago,” says Rona Tutt, former president of the National Association of Head Teachers. “Some healthy school initiatives existed before, but money was hard to come by and schools had their hands tied by competitive tendering. Jamie Oliver kick-started the whole thing when he showed that 37p per pupil per day is about the same as we spend on feeding our cats and dogs.”

But will the £220 million of extra funding for the school meals service and the £60 million for an independent School Food Trust announced in March by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, be enough to kill off turkey twizzlers?

“The issues have been flagged up and we are now in an interim period. But once the new standards are combined with extra money there should be big changes,” says Tutt.

The package aims to encourage healthy eating habits among the nation’s millions of schoolchildren — including a minimum spending on ingredients of 50p a day per pupil in primary schools and 60p in secondaries. There are plans to improve school kitchens and teach 15,000 dinner ladies the importance of fresh ingredients and alternatives to fast food.

Starting this month minimum health guidelines have been put in place for processed foods such as burgers, sausages and cakes. The aim is to reduce the levels of salt, fat and sugar in meals. Ofsted will broaden its remit to ensure that schools are keeping up with the new standards.

A survey published in March by the British Market Research Bureau found that 75 per cent of parents would be prepared to pay more for school dinners if they included more fresh food. It also found that almost one in seven children shunned dinners in favour of eating from vending machines or shops.

There are no vending machines at Leytonstone School, East London, which is drawing up guidelines on healthy lifestyle concerns for schools. Joan McVittie, the head teacher and a member of the school meals review panel, says the school has an outstanding cook who provides menus that range from goat and pea curry, and wraps with healthy fillings to homemade quiche and cakes, and fresh fruit salads.

Chips are limited to three days a week — the two chip-free days a week are random. “We don’t tell them which days,” says McVittie, “otherwise they will get a note from their parents to go out to McDonalds or the chip shop.”

The root of the problem, particularly in deprived areas, lies with the parents, she says. “The children come from a generation of parents unaware of healthy eating.”

Monitoring, she adds, is a key to improvement. McVittie and her deputy will personally oversee the dinner queue and alert students if they are eating too many chips. According to McVittie, the NHS needs to start pulling its weight. “There needs to be more thorough monitoring of levels of obesity in children from an early age. We already refer children whom we have concerns about to a nurse. Maybe we need to say some harsh things to the parents and help them to manage that situation for the children.”

Ministers have set a target in their five-year plan for the future of education to halve obesity among primary school children by 2009.