Letters.

Jamie Oliver is right to blame parents

So, at last Jamie Oliver turns his sights on the people who many of us connected to the school meals service have been pointing our fingers at for years: the parents.

While everyone has been happily criticising school meals - and the schools which work hard to provide them - for the past year or so, no one has had the courage (Oliver included, until now) to question the responsibility of those so-called adults who wield the most influence over the nation's kids.

Judging by the state of some who drop their kids off at the gate every morning, I think Oliver's various labels of "tossers", "idiots" and "arseholes" is only the half of it. Most look like they haven't been near the vegetable aisle in the supermarket for years, let alone eaten any.

Instead, they send their kids off to school with the latest pop and sugar-coated rubbish and then wonder why their octane-fuelled little darling has been excluded for trying to pull the classroom apart.

Meanwhile, we are trying to implement new guidelines on healthy eating and do so on an extraordinarily tight budget. That's fine, but if kids continue to be allowed to turn up with rubbish in their lunchboxes, then we're no better off than Sisyphus eternally rolling his rock up the mountain: doomed.

Catering manager