Save our school dinners!

Providing good, nutritious school food is one way of starting children on the path to a healthy future. If you care about the food your children eat at school and want them to have the start in life they deserve, then you can help by writing to your MP.

• Write to your MP
• Find out more about why school food matters

We have teamed up with the Children's Food Campaign and other school food and children's health campaigners to ask the government to protect the new healthy lunches and promote good food education at school.

Children need good food to stay healthy and to learn and achieve to the best of their ability. But there have been worrying signs that school food is not a priority for this government and that all the success we've had improving the quality of food in schools may be unravelled. For instance, the government have already scrapped the proposed extension to free school meals, and earlier this year health minister Andrew Lansley hit the headlines when he criticised the 'Jamie Oliver' approach to school dinners.

We've seen already that when we all pull together we really can make a difference. When the former health minister Andrew Lansley criticised school dinners, a public and media outcry forced a Department of Health spokesperson to retract Mr Lansley's comments and explain that 'the health secretary had applauded Oliver's campaign... He criticised Labour government restrictions on the campaign'.

Don't let this generation down - a healthy future starts at school.

Write to your MP

With Lib Dem MP Annette Brooke we have tabled an Early Day Motion in parliament to protect our school dinners from cuts to local authority budgets. (An EDM is a parliamentary petition that only MPs can sign, to move a particular issue up the government’s agenda).

Write to your MP and ask them to sign our parliamentary petition to protect the school lunch service from Local Authority budget cuts. Our parliamentary petition asks the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove to recognise all the benefits of a good school meal service and to protect school lunch from cuts to local authority budgets, by introducing a minimum spend on ingredients for every child’s meal.

• Read the full text of Early Day Motion 413 and see which MPs have already signed

Contact your MP using these easy steps

1. First you need to know their name. If you don’t, you can find the name of your local MP by going to www.writetothem.com and entering your postcode.
2. On the following page, you can click on the name of your MP (in the third column) and email them by following the instructions on the Write to Them site.
3. If you’d prefer to email them yourself, most MPs can be contacted by using the following format of email address: secondnamefirstinitial@parliament.uk
4. For instance, to email David Cameron you would use camerond@parliament.uk
5. That’s it! Please do let us know what response you receive, by emailing ehockridge@soilassociation.org
6. If you’d prefer you can send a letter to:
   ‘Local MP’s name’ MP (e.g. David Cameron MP)
   House of Commons
   London
   SW1A 0AA

This campaign is also supported by: