Leading article: Twizzlers are hardly the worst of it

But if parents are not responsible, then who is? Of course, school dinners ought to be of a reasonable nutritional standard. And education authorities should not have pared spending on school meals down to the point they did. And schools should not have been allowed to install vending machines that encouraged unhealthy eating and drinking between meals. And school canteens should not have been offering chips with everything (or nothing) every day. And what Scolarest had on its menus should have been monitored more closely.

In the end, though, parents are responsible for what and how their children eat. It should not have taken Jamie Oliver and the full glare of television to discover the lamentable depths to which school food had sunk. There should have been an outcry on the part of parents and teachers long before. Schools can help foster healthy eating habits, but what children eat out of school is every bit as important. The disgrace is that there are children for whom the regular ingestion of Turkey Twizzlers at school was by no means the least nutritious aspect of their diet.