School meals no place for petty dictatorship

THERE is so much fuss about schools making rules about what schoolchildren are 
allowed to have in their lunch boxes.

A few weeks ago I heard that a school decided to ban their pupils from bringing their own packed lunch so they could either eat a cooked school dinner or go home and eat there.

Schools do not have a right to stop their pupils bringing their own packed lunch and having what they want in their lunch box.

When it was decided by Nick Clegg that children aged from five to seven would get free school dinners, I fully disagreed with this policy.

When I was this age, my school meals were paid for by my parents and not the taxpayers, so why should taxpayers have to cover the cost of free school dinners?

All pupils partaking in school meals had to have the set dinner and pudding – there were no other options. If we didn’t like an item on our plate we were still expected to eat it.

Schools don’t have the right to look inside children’s lunch boxes to see if they have got healthy food and not any “banned” items.

Surely, schools are supposed to be a place of learning, not a dictatorship over lunch boxes?