It's not as though the Government didn't know about the appalling state of school meals before Jamie Oliver started raising public awareness.
There has been a plethora of Government initiatives running in the past year, from the Healthy Schools Programme, National Healthy School Standard, and the National School Fruit Scheme to the Healthy Living Blueprint for schools. Yet none of this seems to have made much difference to the vast majority of school pupils. That is because it doesn't seem to have had any impact on the central problem: what schools and education authorities are prepared to spend on meals for pupils.
We reported in April last year that the Local Authority Caterers Association had estimated that an average of 154m per year had been saved from school catering budgets since 1994 as a result of competitive pressure, cost cutting and other factors. That's more than 1.5bn that has been diverted from the diet of the nation's school pupils. While some of this can probably be put down to genuine efficiency savings, it is hard to believe that such reductions can have been achieved without any impact on quality.
At the same time schools, education authorities and central government have been wringing their hands over bad behaviour and struggling to meet learning targets. Yet there is mounting evidence of the links between diet, educational attainment and behaviour.
Last week Kelly promised extra money to help raise the quality of school meals, although we have yet to hear the details or whether it will come anywhere near to reversing the trend of the last decade. This is something of an irony when ministers refused just one year ago to stop Essex from becoming the first authority to pull out of providing hot school meals altogether.
It took Jamie Oliver to get parents involved in a national debate not just about quality but about its relationship to spending. And it will take pressure from parents, especially at a local level, to ensure that the debate leads to any real improvement in what lands on children's plates.
