Leading Article: Wrong messages for our children

An old Jesuit maxim allegedly ran, "give me a child at seven and he will be mine for life". Food and drinks companies appear to have embraced the same philosophy, prompting the Children's Food Campaign to sound an alarm over the way manufacturers are supplying schools with teaching packs full of coded and not-so-coded adverts for their products.

For hard-pressed teachers, the temptation to make use of free lesson plans must be great. Hence the temptation also for some teachers to glide over the fact that the "lessons" are often not neutral sources of nutritional information but sometimes downright unhelpful.

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How advisable is it for a generation of children increasingly suffering from obesity to learn via the British Soft Drinks Association that they ought not to refill empty soft drinks bottles with tap water because it might be contaminated? Should they hear from Britvic that soft drinks are filled with "gooditives"? Some claims made in these lesson packs are not so much false as unproven. The Dairy Council might lay down that children need three portions of milk, cheese or yoghurt a day, as if this was indisputable, but that is not the advice of the Food Standards Agency.

In a free-market society, it is obviously impractical to imagine that school environments can be hermetically sealed off from the world of advertising. Arguably, some exposure to these forces can be salutary. If school is a preparation for real life, advertising is the oxygen of the capitalist society in which those pupils will one day live and work. It needs also to be pointed out that there is nothing illegal about companies targeting schools in this fashion.

The question is one of degree and control. It is extraordinary that, whereas the content of advertisements aired on television is monitored by the Advertising Standards Authority, which can order adverts to be withdrawn, no one vets the accuracy of the content of advertisements sent to schools in lesson packs.

If companies will not agree to rein in their wilder flights of fantasy regarding the benefits of their products in lesson packs, which seems unlikely, some form of regulation will have to be introduced.