The Education supplement (Daily Echo, September 23) was headlined A fat lot of good parents are doing, and stated: “It is unrealistic to expect schools to bring about change without support from families.”

Jamie Oliver’s now chubby little face was also pictured, yet even his supposed radical school menus don’t appear to have helped.

So what about going back to 1960s school dinners?

Parents paid the weekly five shillings dinner money, and everyone, including the teachers, were served with exactly the same food every day, with no alternatives.

You ate it or you starved, with the menu rotating on perhaps a fortnightly basis.

And while the cabbage was nicknamed “seaweed,” the mash had more lumps than smooth, the rice pudding had skin like leather, and all there was to drink was water, we survived.

It wasn’t much different at home, either, and if you didn’t eat whatever mum provided, you were sent to your room and went without.

My toes used to curl when the elder generation looked upon us youngsters with utter contempt and said: “Those were the days.”

And I hate to have to repeat their words, but they were – obesity was just a word in the dictionary which had yet to be discovered.

Alan Burridge, Blandford Road, Upton