Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver says nine out of ten free school breakfasts in clubs being rolled out by the government are ‘unhealthy’.
Mr Oliver, a long term campaigner for healthy food in schools, said noone was imposing standards on the food served and more should be done to do so.
And while he welcomed some provision rather than none, he said: ‘There are no standards for these free breakfasts in Britain. We now provide some breakfasts but I can guarantee you that nine out of ten will be unhealthy breakfasts.’
Mr Oliver, who started his campaign for better school lunches back in 2005, said data showed that children in the UK were leaving school unhealthier than when they started.
‘Around 640,000 kids are coming out of education a year and the question is ‘are they coming out in better nick than they went in?’ and the data says ‘no’.
‘If you have some of the unhealthiest kids in Europe and if you can associate that with productivity and then mental health then all you have to do is let the talented people within your orbit have some standards and then procurement changes,’ he said.
Calling on primary schools to impose standards to force change, he said: ‘When you are ordering at a civic level, just having standards starts to completely change commercial companies. They have to deliver product which fits in. Nothing is binary – when you have standards, the ripples of good are far and wide.’
Speaking to a BBC podcast, Mr Oliver, who has just turned 50, also warned that despite improvements in school lunches since his campaign launched, he could not guarantee they were healthy because no compliance checks were being imposed.
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver says nine out of ten free school breakfasts in clubs being rolled out by the government are ‘unhealthy’
‘The standards are good and they are being updated now but because there are no compliance checks, I can’t promise you how much better or worse they are. If we don’t know who is complying then we can’t deploy love, care, attention, technology, equipment or training.’
The government has pledged to roll out free breakfast clubs for all primary schools in England with an initial pilot of 750, some of whom were already providing breakfast club provision, ahead of a further rollout to 2000 more planned for next year.
But the scheme has been beset with difficulty with around one in ten of the original schools dropping out of the scheme blaming inadequate funding.
Government funding currently only extends to the provision of 60 pence per child and 78 pence per child who is already eligible for free school meals but does not cover other costs such as staffing and transport, leading to critics saying the breakfasts are not free at all.
A survey of primary school leaders earlier this year revealed three-quarters believed delivering a free breakfast club was ‘not financially viable for their school’.