The drive to make school meals healthier is being jeopardised by the soaring cost of staple foods, leaving canteens struggling to provide nutritious and cheap dinners, local authorities say.

Double-digit increases in the cost of foodstuffs such as bread, eggs and cooking oil have left local authorities struggling to maintain high-quality subsidised dinners. Dining hall managers have given warning that, if they pass on the rising costs of presenting healthy meals, parents may tell their children to eat less healthy food outside schools.

They fear that, if the take-up of meals drops, the purchasing power of local councils will fall, raising costs further and causing canteens to disappear from schools completely.

The average price of a school meal to parents last year in England was £1.64, according to the Local Authority Caterers Association (LACA) survey, but that conceals a subsidy averaging 43p per meal.

John Freeman, director of children’s services at Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, said that if food prices continued to rise the Government’s attempts to eradicate bad school food would be derailed. “The fact is the cost of providing healthy food is more than [the cost of] turkey twizzlers,” Mr Freeman said. “There will be a tipping point when the take-up of meals drops below a threshold and it’ll spin out of control. It could be within the year.”

Sandra Russell, the chairman of LACA, said that most local authority school catering was running at a loss and price rises were almost inevitable. “We are experiencing inflation at a time when we are trying to meet nutritional requirements. We are stretching the elastic band to the limit,” she said.

In Bradford, parents pay £1.35 for a primary school dinner but the total cost is about £1.90. Roger Sheard, head of operations at Bradford, is worried that without guarantees of long-term funding the service will not continue. He says that Bradford has a 55 per cent take-up in its primary schools and runs on a tight rein, trying to keep the price low while sustaining quality.

The Government has injected £240 million into school catering for the next three years. A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that ministers were aware of the impact of food price increases on school catering but could not give assurances for funding beyond the three-year government spending plans. “School food is high on ministerial priorities,” he said.

New government rules on nutrition, which come into force in September, are maintaining pressure on caterers.

The drive to improve school meals and combat obesity, highlighted by Jamie Oliver’s TV campaign against unhealthy school food, , has left councils with little room to trim the costs.

“The Government has put in more money to support the initiative, but the difficulty is that it is the staple products that are rising: flour, butter, eggs,” Ms Russell said.

Contract catering firms are turning away business from local authorities that are unable to meet the cost and cannot generate the economies of scale. A spokesman for Compass, which supplies a tenth of all school meals, said: “The problem is that government has introduced new standards and not thought about funding.”

One example of the global food price explosion can be seen in Doncaster, where the council’s cheese bill has risen by £12,000.

Bradford is facing similar price surges: “Cheese is up from £3.04 to £4.40, pasta is up from £2.09 to £3.80 and tuna fish is going up 20 per cent next month,” Mr Sheard said.

Times Recommends

• What makes the perfect mum?
• To keep me stress-free, no more awareness days, please
• What do lottery winners buy?