So, we shouldn't be surprised that, in the first week of term, only just half the reception children at Tredegarville Church in Wales Primary School in Cardiff were eating the school lunch they were entitled to. It's difficult to understand the complexity of the reasons why the others weren't taking it up, but some of it is to do with the anxiety of the parent, who wants to ensure that the child is getting something they know they like. They didn't have the 'Will I drop the tray?' anxiety, which any four-year old would experience, because the meal was being served in the classroom for those particular children. And I'm sure that take-up will improve as the pupils see what their classmates are enjoying in the way of food and they begin to think, 'Well, I'd like to have a go at that as well.' So, it's really important that packed lunch children are not segregated from school meal eaters, because it also produces a disincentive; if your particular friend always has a packed lunch, you are going to have a packed lunch too. But if you've got free choice, then it makes it much easier to promote it to everybody.

It's a real challenge for headteachers, because very young children need time to eat, and the lunch break is never more than an hour. So, at Albany school, the reception children go into the dining room first, and are lovingly looked after by the class teacher, the teaching assistants and the midday meal supervisors, and that's necessary with children of such a young age. Based on my own grandchildren's evolving relationship with food, I sympathise with the anxious parent who ignored their child's free school meal entitlement and sent them in with a beautifully prepared packed lunch instead, which this girl showed me, full of wonderful vegetables and fruit—all of it untouched; I'm sure it was all going to go home. It's really complicated with very small children.

Bear in mind that children arrive in reception aged four with the eating habits they've acquired from birth. Toddlers will be obliged to adopt the eating habits of their parents—that's what they've been exposed to. So, what happens in households where no fresh fruit or vegetables are available because of poverty or of other complex reasons—generations of not being able to understand what is the best for us? Unless children at a young age are exposed to a range of tastes, they may be reluctant to try something new. Some even develop something called neophobia, which is literally a fear of the new, and others won't eat food that is touching another food—I know all about that—or will only eat specific things. It's really important that we do not use food as a reward, because otherwise we may be setting up really serious problems for the future. If you say, 'If you do this, if you behave today, we'll give you an ice cream', what are you doing? You are rewarding the child. The emotional response is that you're going to get a reward in something that's nice to have, but not particularly good for you. So, there's a really complex set of arrangements around weaning and encouraging children to eat a healthy, balanced diet.

It's probably the most important initiative we have, to ensure that every child gets a healthy, balanced diet through the primary school breakfast and the nutritious hot lunches. Brutally, we can't afford not to do it, because we can't go on spending 10 per cent of our NHS budget on treating type 2 diabetes, which is really driven by poor diet and the resulting obesity. We cannot go on tolerating the number of children aged five who have missing, decayed or filled teeth—one of the strongest indicators of food poverty and poor nutrition, which I witness time and again, every time I go into an educational institution. The teachers report that, yes, the parents of those children don't have any teeth, because what's going on at home is people eating all the wrong things and probably not looking after their teeth.

So, we really do have to question what health visitors are managing to do to really make a difference in their interactions with parents, to ensure that new generations of children are not suffering from the problems that current adults have today. And on the radio today, yet another report about the significant rise in a series of cancers, all related to poor diet—and that's across lots of countries, not just our country. We can't go on like this, despite the apparent ambition of the latest UK Government to row back on the obesogenic food culture that we have allowed to dominate our lives.

Developing healthy citizens is one of the core purposes of the new curriculum, and it's a challenge for all those involved in the education of children. We can't go on having children who simply don't know that carrots come out of the ground. The School Food Trust did a survey of English infant pupils who ate free school lunches. They demonstrated, in 2010, that they had tried food at school that they had not tried at home, and half of the parents questioned said that their children had asked for foods that they had eaten at school to be cooked at home. The most popular items—probably no surprise to us—were carrots, sweetcorn and peas, because these are rather sweet, whereas the least popular were aubergine, chickpeas and spinach. But, you know, the more that we encourage children to try, and the more that we involve parents in supporting their children to pre-book the meals that will make the child feel more comfortable, that they are going to get served what they wanted, and also minimising food waste—. It's really developing that family learning.

We need to involve children in growing food, as well as preparing it. That will also be a really good way of getting them to eat new things. For example, Cardiff built on the experience of the summer Food and Fun scheme, where children had enjoyed making and eating spicy bean casserole. It's now a fortnightly feature on Monday's school meals menus in Cardiff, where the chef at one of the schools that I visited said, 'Oh, I don't know if they are going to like that.' She is not somebody who likes spicy food, so you just have to hope that she doesn't influence the take-up. I'm sorry to see that they have put it up against tomato and cheese pizza, which is a challenge, I have to say. Nevertheless, you can see how it's such an exciting moment for really endorsing and developing healthy future generations. There is more that I could say on all of that, but I want to move on, really, because I'm going to run out of time. 

Food procurement is the next step that we need to look at. Carmarthenshire has been in the lead because of some of the grants that they have had through our colleague, Lee Waters, in a former role. They haven't yet made any changes to school menus, to date, because they have had to focus on ensuring the roll-out of universal free school meals to students. So, they haven't amended any of their menus. But I was, nevertheless, delighted to see that on their menu is a lot of home-made food, and I asked, 'What do you mean by home-made food?' Home-made food means food made in the school, so the smell of that food will penetrate the dining rooms, and will obviously enable the cook to amend things. If kids don't like one thing, they can change it to be another thing.

We are very lucky to have people like Castell Howell and Harlech Foodservice as our food suppliers, who are Welsh, and who are really keen on the agenda to really improve food procurement. But we really do have to take it a lot further. As Carmarthenshire said, this is really about system change, and it's complicated. So, they are experimenting in Carmarthenshire to see how they can get local produce onto the public school sector plate, and they have used Government grants to look at this, working with food experts and CLES to do this. But we have to realise that, in the current context, with all the current problems, this is phase two of the scheme, and something that I'm really excited about, but it's not something that's going to happen overnight. So, thank you for listening, and I look forward to hearing other people's contributions.