Gone are the days of lumpy gravy and tapioca for modern school dinners where the emphasis is on making mealtime a more haute-cuisine experience.

These days, the second a pupil steps into the dining room, they are magically transformed from a common student into a consumer.

This fairly fundamental shift is behind the huge changes in the dining room.

"The children always used to be a captive audience, so you could pretty much get away with anything," said Alan Hall, head teacher of Belle Vue Girls School.

"Now we have takeaway foods and mobile food vans that come around, so their custom cannot be guaranteed. People are more interested in food than they were 20 or 30 years ago and they eat more foreign food and generally have higher standards, so school meals have got to reflect that."

At Belle Vue Girls, there is an innovative scheme to involve the students with choosing the type of food on offer in their canteen.

The SCOF - or School Committee on Food - is made up of pupils, teachers and the community dietician. They help plan the meals at the canteen and earlier this year came up with the pioneering idea of serving breakfast in school, to make sure that the girls do have the most important meal of the day. The district's secondary schools all have bustling canteens where teenagers can pick up their regular diet of chips, chips and chips.

But all canteens, with an eye on fostering good-eating habits that youngsters take with them into later life, now have healthy alternatives each lunchtime.

Roger Sheard, Business Development Manager at Bradford Council, who oversees the school meals service, said it was a central part of the provision. "Actually chips are popular, but so is pasta and pizza and the salad bar.

"More and more young people are getting the healthy eating message because it's on the national curriculum, so what's taught in the classroom is often bought in the dining room."

Next week sees National School Meals Week, which is designed to raise awareness of children's health and dietary needs.

For the next two years, the theme will be The Body Clock and special events, such as themed menus, are being planned.

The school meals service in Bradford is itself a picture of health. Other authorities have seen demand plummet, but Bradford is more than holding its own.

Mr Sheard believes that it is because they listen to their young consumers and, vitally, provide meals that actually cater forthe unique Bradford community. "We were the first authority to serve Halal meals in school. Now we serve about 1,500,000 Halal meals a year and they are very popular," he said.

In secondary schools the idea is that pupils are big enough and old enough to choose for themselves.

But in Bradford's first school, it is a set menu with variations for the growing number of vegetarians. Lidget Green First School is one of the very few to maintain the tradition of family serving, where instead of queueing up at the counter with a tray, eight youngsters sit around a table for eight and two of the older children act as servers.

It gives a valuable lesson in social etiquette, says headteacher Alan Greenwood.

"It is more sociable and it gives the older children responsibility because they see it as a privilege to be giving out the food.

"It's not to say it's perfect. There is a great deal more noise, washing up and food on the floor, but I will hold on to it because it does teach good table manners."

Things like pasta and pizza on the menu are a hit with the young cosmopolitan diners, but traditional nosh still has a place on the table.

Custard is still a popular choice for pudding, although sago is still as revolting now as it was then.

And, says Mr Greenwood, some things never change.

"The children still enjoy rice pudding with a blob of jam in the middle and they still love swirling it around and making pink rice pudding."

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