It’s not for our schools to say what we can eat

In this week’s paper we bring you a story of one school banning crisps from lunchboxes in a bid to crack down on childhood obesity. It’s not the first time one of our schools has made a bold statement in forbidding certain items, but should they be the ones enforcing such rules?

There is unquestionably a big issue about our young children’s health, with statistics revealing a staggering 16% of Year 6 pupils round the borough being declared obese last year.

Naturally, we want to encourage them to eat a balanced diet as well as promoting the importance of exercise – indeed, that was a huge part of the much-trumpeted “Olympic legacy” that bosses wanted to leave after the hugelypopular Games arrived in London back in 2012.

The government recommends schools provide pupils with a minimum of two hours of physical education per week, but a number of schools are going well above and beyond that, with teachers at Wateringbury Primary – the school at the heart of this story – urged to take students out of the classroom three times a week for a 10-minute run.

If schools want to play a big role in helping make us healthy and active, that’s fantastic news, but explicitly telling children what they can and can’t eat is ultimately not their responsibility.

After all, a certain Usain Bolt, who lit up those aforementioned Olympics seven-and-a-half years ago, swears by eating chicken nuggets before a race, and I dare say you’d struggle to find many dieticians willing to endorse them as a symbol of healthy eating.

Surely the key is to encourage everything in moderation, and trust parents to know what’s best for their children.