JAMIE OLIVER made a valiant assault on children’s taste buds in his crusade to revolutionise school dinners and tempt pupils away from unhealthy fast food.

But schools in Glasgow have discovered that good old- fashioned bribery works just as well as a fancy menu in the battle to entice children to eat their greens. The schools are rewarding pupils, who choose healthy school dinners, with iPod mp3 players and Xbox games consoles. The ground-breaking scheme in Glasgow’s 29 secondary schools works like a supermarket loyalty card with pupils accumulating points for buying healthy food using an individual swipecard.

At the “Fuel Zones”, school dining halls, the pupils receive points for choosing items such as salad (15 points), pasta (15 points) and water (15 points), for example, instead of chips (nil points), beef burger or pizza (3 points) and Irn Bru (nil points). The points are accumulated on a term-by-term basis and can be redeemed for items ranging from cinema tickets (850 points) to the latest iPod (4,000 points) and Xbox games consoles (3,000 points).

The £40,000 initiative, the first of its kind, has already had an impact on dietary habits and it is hoped it will go some way to shaking off Glasgow’s reputation as the heart disease capital of Europe.

Since the launch a year ago, the take-up of school dinners has risen from 46 per cent to 70 per cent, amounting to about 21,000 pupils, allowing the council to have a direct influence on what children eat.

The number of pupils choosing healthy options has almost doubled, up from 30 per cent to more than 50 per cent, while the consumption of chips has dropped from 80 per cent to 45 per cent. The most popular meal choice has been a Vital Mix, costing £1.15, with a 40 points rewards, the maximum on offer. It is a combination of soup, a filled pitta or sandwich, yoghurt, raisins or fruit and a healthy drink, such as milk.

It would take 100 Vital Mix meals, achievable over a school year, to reach the 4,000 points needed for the iPod.

If all 10,500 pupils now eating healthy options saved for the iPod-20GB on offer, which retails at £209, the council’s rewards bill would be more than £2 million. But Fergus Chambers, head of Glasgow’s £119 million school catering service, said that that would never happen. “If things started to go crazy, we’d amend the rules,” he said.

The idea for the points reward scheme came from the Glasgow pupils themselves who said that it would take away the stigma of being called a “goody two shoes” by peers for choosing salad instead of chips. Francis Carroll, 13, of St Thomas Aquinas Secondary School, said that eating habits had changed since the scheme started. “I used to have a burger every day (3 points) but now I have the Vital Mix and maybe have a burger once or twice in a term,” he said. “I ’m saving up 3,000 points for an Xbox and I like the healthy food now.” The only downside, he said, was that the queues for school dinners were long these days.

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