TV chef Jamie Oliver appeared today to have won a victory in his war against junk food in schools when Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, announced a pre-election climbdown on funding for school meals.

More than five million people watched Oliver feed Charles Clarke, Ms Kelly's predecessor at Education, a reconstituted turkey patty in last week's final episode of his Channel 4 series, Jamie's School Dinners. An online petition calling for junk food to be banned from school menus today climbed past 150,000 signatures.

But although the Government began making encouraging noises at the weekend about improving the quality of food served in school canteens, Ms Kelly made clear in a television interview last night that she did not have any extra money to offer to raise the average cost of ingredients from its current level of 37p.

By today, as she helped launch Labour's "mini-manifesto" for children, she had changed her tune, promising that the Government would, after all, find some extra cash to improve the quality of school meals.

"It is difficult to produce a high quality school meal for 37pence," the Education Secretary said. "Many schools of course, already spend more than that. All have the powers to do so.

"But I can confirm today that we will help them by making available more money for schools to raise the quality of school meals. I will make more details available in the next few weeks.

"Our commitment today is that a third-term Labour government will make additional resources available to build and rebuild kitchen and dining areas alongside additional resources to raise the quality of food served to children every day too.

"We want every child, whose parents choose it, to enjoy a healthy, high quality school lunch."

Ms Kelly also announced the formation of the School Meals Trust, an organisation to help parents and schools raise the quality of school food. She said the Government would commit extra money for building new kitchens and renovating existing ones so that fresh food could be cooked in schools.

The Government will also work to improve the training of school dinner ladies and catering staff and ask Ofsted to consider the quality of food in its school inspections, she said.

But it was the first time that the Government had accepted that the current budget for ingredients was insufficient, or that it needed to get involved in increasing it.

The backdown appeared to be a major victory for Oliver, a 29-year-old father-of- two who defied expectations when he managed to persuade children at more than a dozen schools in the London borough of Greenwich to forgo Turkey Twizzlers, burgers and chips for real food, including fresh vegetables.

But the Government denied that its hand had been forced by Oliver's programme. "It isn't Jamie Oliver who's started the Government on this route," Margaret Hodge, the Children's Minister, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "We have actually been working for quite some time. We are the ones who introduced fresh fruit for all children in infant schools and nursery schools."

With campaigning already under way for a May 5 election that has only to be called, the Tories dismissed Ms Kelly's plans as a "gimmick".

And Phil Willis, the Lib-Dem education spokesman, said: "I think this is nothing more than a cheap election stunt to hide the fact that, for eight years under his (Tony Blair's) stewardship, our children have been eating the most appalling food, which has got low nutritional standards.

"Some of our poorest children are being fed stuff which, quite frankly, a lot of people wouldn't even put in their garbage can."

In a statement on his campaign website at www.feedmebetter.com Mr Oliver said he was "really pleased" that the Government was starting to take his Feed Me Better campaign seriously.

"I am really keen to learn of the details of what they plan to do to improve school dinners," he said. "If changes are made, it will only be a matter of months before British health, education and farming could be affected for the better. It could be one of the biggest food revolutions that England has ever seen."

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