Sheila Dillon

It told us the trials carried out last year showed healthier school food does not have to cost more.

They say that most school meals are paid for by parents.

with the prices set by schools and caterers, and free school meal funding is only part of a wider school budget.

The Department for Education also said it's investing more broadly, including free breakfast clubs, and the expansion of free school meals to more families from September this year.

To help with the changes, from September, all schools will be able to get support from the School Food Project,

a collaboration of several organizations led by Chefs in Schools.

For the past eight years, Chefs in Schools have been placing chefs into schools to help reshape food, not just at lunchtime, but across the wider school day, as you might have heard here on the food program.

Its chief executive is Naomi Duncan.

We've heard from writer Heather Parry about her thoughts on what she sees as the top-down Jamie Oliver campaign from the early 2000s.

How do you make changes happen and be welcomed by the people at the receiving end of these changes?

I think that's the crux of the question, really, isn't it?

You think that what the government is asking for in these standards is realistic.

I mean, you know how school kitchens work.

You know how the big global companies fill their contracts.

Is it realistic what the government is asking for?

Naomi Duncan from Chefs in Schools.

If you want more information, by the way, on the School Food Project, you can sign up on their website, schoolfoodproject.org.uk.

As someone who's reported on school food for decades, I've often been mystified by the British reluctance to take lessons from elsewhere, particularly from places where they don't suffer the same degree of chronic sickness that now bedevils us in the UK.

Scandinavia, Finland, France, many Mediterranean countries, and Japan all take school food seriously.

Japan came to our attention recently when we saw online some videos made in a Japanese school by Colette Fox, who's the public food lead at the charity ProVeg International.