I FIND it extraordinary that the government announces that five and six-year-old school children are going to get school meals, as if this is a major progressive policy, when in the 1950s/60s all children got school meals through all their school years.

Although I must say I was entirely puzzled and shocked when I found in the 1980s that school meals were not available to children in Poole or, as far as I know, in Dorset.

Dorset must then stand as a very rare exception insofar as the dinner lady and school dinners are well-known to be part of school culture through UK going back to the back 1940s.

And to that I can only add, how third rate is an education system that requires children to be in school seven hours a day and will not provide access to midday meals.

We wouldn’t do this to adults in offices or factories would we?

Nor would we deny access to hot meals to prison inmates.

But that clearly is the state for most children in Dorset schools.

One packed box, inevitably, as driven be the supermarket industry is stuffed with coloured, salt/sugar saturated products – in truth little more than commercial mockeries of anything like a properly cooked meal.

And now we find the company charged with the delivery of some sort of meal to children in Dorset is either delivering very poor quality, or not delivering at all.

But then should we be surprised?

Yet another mass delivery company, set up to mass deliver, in this case mass-produced meals, as cheaply as possible.

We want our children to have proper meals.

Our children have a right to midday hot meals.

Government policy has to invest in school kitchens and staff and commit to freshly cooked meals.

In a word get back to the 1950s when we were doing it right, and include Dorset.

JEFF WILLIAMS, Jubilee Road, Parkstone