How we learned to love school meals

Pupils and staff in the vegetable garden at Haworth primary school. Photograph: Asadour Guzelian for the Guardian

Britain's school dinners are a miserablist national obsession in much the same way that the weather is, or trains, or feckless politicians. We expect them to be awful, even though the reality can be surprisingly good. OK, maybe not the politicians, but you get my point: look beyond the bad press about turkey twizzlers and nip down to your local school for lunch, because you may be pleasantly surprised.

Earlier this week I did just that. With an hour's notice Gillespie primary school in north London agreed to stand me lunch. It's easier than you'd think to check out your school's offerings – some organise food-tasting days, most are very receptive and proud of their food so happy to allow parents in and anyone who's interested can – and should – ask if not invited.

In many ways Gillespie is your classic, surprisingly high-achieving inner-city joint. The pupils come from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds, a high proportion of its kids get free school meals, and its latest Ofsted report calls it "outstanding".

Reception is plastered with photos from cookery club, and as children are dropped off, a woman reminds parents to bring ingredients for tomorrow's pizza-making. She struggles to explain what the word "cheese" means with one mother. In the dining hall a smiling lady (they're all ladies) serves me two perfectly roasted chicken drumsticks, roasted potatoes, carrots and cabbage. I help myself to the salad bar and squeeze into a mini-seat next to headteacher Mark Owen to take a look.

This food is not slop. It is decent, well-cooked, flavoursome and nutritionally balanced with fully recognisable ingredients. It's unambitious and familiar to the kids – and most of them (but not all) tell me "I love school dinners". What they love most, though, is Owen sitting with them in the dining room every lunchtime. They clearly adore him, and sharing the dining experience seems tremendously important.

Across the country, the picture is similar: most schools strive to feed kids decent meals on low budgets and they're doing pretty well. They have to: the School Food Standards – statute introduced in the wake of Jamie Oliver's school-meals campaign – dictates minimum levels of nutrition for most schools (academies are excepted). So what's going on? Have school dinners been fixed? Can we move on to the next problem – non-existent playing fields?

Well, not quite. Child nutrition remains stubbornly problematic, with schoolchildren's food lacking fruit and veg, oily fish and fibre (Diet Adequacy in UK Schoolchildren study in Nutrition & Food Science, 2011), and it's not just the food on plates, but the whole culture of growing, cooking and eating that we need to work on. We still need to heal the postwar culinary rift created when multiple factors, including arduous rationing, largely broke an entire British generation's relationship with food.

But we stand on the brink of something really exciting. The recently launched School Food Plan (SFP) [PDF] is a government-backed series of recommendations to improve matters further that – crucially – has state funding. This could be the game-changer that helps our kids become healthier, happier and better-performing, and eventually puts food and cooking back firmly at the heart of British life.

The 149-page SFP is readable and comprehensive, with achievable objectives. Co-author Henry Dimbleby says that when he visited schools (and he visited a lot), he too was shocked to find "School meals were a lot better than expected – and 77% of kids thought that the food was good."

"Our perception seems to be wrong, as does that of parents, who send 57% of kids to school with a packed lunch, kicking the school food system and its liquidity thoroughly in the balls while at the same time robbing kids of nutritional potential, because only 1% of packed lunches meet the nutritional standards that apply to school meals."

You might think we've been here before (remember Tony Blair and Jamie Oliver) but unless parents actually visit schools at lunchtimes they won't see how far things have moved on since Jamie's School Dinners revealed how bad they were back in 2005. But now that the grub is better, it's time to tackle the rest of school-food culture.

The head of the Children's Food Trust, Linda Cregan, says that fixing the food on plates was just the start. "Improvements are phenomenal but food is only one element of the experience. Pupils care about a whole bunch of other things: queues, price, the relative merits of the cafe down the road. And these challenges are almost bigger than the food itself … I'd encourage parents to go in and find out for themselves."

Neil Lovell, CEO of the Jamie Oliver Foundation, also mentions a "disconnect between parents and the school", and stresses that "unless the head is behind [a whole-school approach to food], nothing really gets done."

For all primaries, cookery is a compulsory part of the curriculum and for many, food features after school too (Gillespie has three separate cookery clubs and its playground houses planters of fruit and vegetables), but the SFP will ensure children get cooking lessons up to the age of 14, learn "where food comes from, and take pleasure in the creative arts of the kitchen".

Some schools already go further than others. Janet Parkinson, head of Howarth primary near York, is an irrepressible advocate for good food. She arrived in 2006 to a school that had been in the bottom 5% of Sats results for five years. The only shining light was an excellent gardening club, so she decided to build on its work with an inspiring gardener and the Food for Life Partnership (FFLP). She put food, gardening and nutrition at the centre of everything the school did.

The children cook in class, and not fairy cakes and eggy bread but rainbow couscous and vegetable kebabs. Phonics is based on plants and the gardening club has evening food-planting sessions. Parkinson worked with caterers to improve food quality, initiated regular farm visits, expanded cooking classes and wrapped subjects such as science and PSHE around food.

It worked. Not only did Howarth's food improve, but school meal take-up rose 50%, and just three years after Parkinson started the school hit the top 5% in terms of Sats. It doesn't stop there, though. Parents are involved, coming into the classroom to cook and eat and the FFLP rewarded the school with its prestigious Gold award.

FFLP's director, Libby Grundy, says her organisation's philosophy runs through the SFP "like a stick of rock" and she's adamant that "unless food becomes part of the whole school day, and beyond into homes, we are unlikely to advance child nutrition on a long-term basis."

All lovely words, but how does this become a reality? Well, there's government funding for most of the SFP recommendations (although universal free school meals won't be funded), and Grundy points out that Ofsted inspectors will consider diet and the canteen atmosphere when they visit schools. She also comes back to the skewed parental view: "the school meal service could go bust … because of perceptions that the food is so bad." Without the backing of heads, the SFP will struggle, and without parents backing school meals, they're doomed.

What do the children think? Well, that's an area that really needs some work. All the over-sevens I speak to know the five-a-day mantra and nutritional basics. And they're all bored witless by them. By beating the nutritional drum so much, we've beaten the fun out of food (the word "fun" doesn't appear once in the SFP) and when so much of their education has been reinvented to make it fascinating, we really should change our teaching about food. Let them play with their food, experiment and explore – why talk calories in the abstract when you can show them custard-powder flamethrowing and corn-ethanol rockets?

So few children I meet have ever done any cooking beyond cake-stirring, yet my kids glow with pride when I teach them knife skills and show them how to handle raw meat or bake bread. All the hard work in the SFP and by teachers, cooks and heads at schools like Howarth and Gillespie will be wasted unless we join in and cook with them at home. As another primary school head told me: "It's not the school's responsibility to fix society's problems on our own. Parents have to help too."

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