Hands up who hasn’t eaten a school lunch? Only those of us who popped home at dinner time, or plumped solidly for the packed lunch box, or perhaps were homeschooled, might say no to this question, which makes eating a school meal a pretty much near-universal experience.

A good school dinner should be at the heart of a school day, and there are schools which put a real emphasis on serving good food. Often, it’s in these schools, that the message about good food in the classroom is synchronised with the quality of food in the canteen. The importance of good food and nourishment to educational attainment has been well-documented in recent years, but since school meals were instituted in 1944, the reputation of school food has had its ups and downs.

Privatisation in the 1980s hit provision hard with quality tumbling. By the 90s studies showed that, in comparison, children were better nourished, and had a healthier diet, in the 1940s and 50s. In the mid-2000s schools’ food reputation finally hit the buffers and in stepped Jamie Oliver to help sort things out.  After years of wrangling and Turkey Twizzler headlines, a TV series and the Feed Me Better campaign, the issue of quality in school food was finally addressed. As a result of the campaign, mandatory School Food Standards were launched in 2015, and lunch, as they say, was fixed, at least for meat-eaters.

Today, some reports say up to 90% of children are eating a school meal every day, but scroll forward the best part of a decade from the Standards becoming a legal requirement and what we have now looks like a potentially polarised situation. On the one hand there are some trailblazing examples of excellence in choice and quality in vegetarian and vegan school food, but on the other, it’s a dismal situation for some vegetarian and vegan school pupils when the dinner time bell goes.