It’s lunchtime and a queue of hungry diners is waiting to eat at one of the tables tastefully decorated with polka dot tablecloths and flowers. Music plays softly in the background and the smell of freshly cooked organic food wafts from the kitchen. This might sound like the scene of a trendy cafe but it’s actually a primary school in Croydon, London.

Children at Rockmount primary are served hot dishes beautifully garnished with fresh herbs or a carefully carved carrot. There’s a salad bar featuring a wide variety of vegetables and the lunch break is longer to give children time to socialise and enjoy their meal.

Like many schools, Rockmount was inspired by Jamie Oliver’s Feed Me Better campaign in 2005 calling for an overhaul of the country’s school dinners, which he claimed failed to provide a balanced diet. It’s been a decade since the celebrity chef won public support and convinced the government to create the Children’s Food Trust. So what positive changes are schools making now and what’s next on the school dinners agenda?

The future of school meals lies in not just in providing healthy choices, but also through improving the mealtime experience, says Rockmount headteacher Tracey Langridge. She believes the problem is that lunchtimes in many schools resemble a factory production line, with students forced to wolf down their food to make way for the next pupil in the queue; there is little time for young people to take an interest in what they are eating.

She would like to see lunch breaks become more of an educational experience. “When you discuss the food on their plates with children over the dinner table, they develop an understanding of why the different food groups are important and the benefits they provide.

“We talk to them about the impact good food has on their learning and on their ability to concentrate. It is definitely having a positive effect and more children are choosing school lunches now than they were before.”

She claims that once children take a greater interest in the content of their dinners, you can begin to teach where their food comes from. Rockmount did this by launching a gardening club, growing vegetables on the school grounds which were then included on the menu and taught about in class.

“We have been really surprised that the children are taking on the importance of being healthy. It’s made us realise that the sooner you get this message across to children, the more likely it is to become an established part of how they think,” Langridge adds.

The primary school’s revamp of its catering services is a nail in the coffin of the notorious school dinners served in the past.

School meals were introduced at the turn of the century to combat mounting concern over the health of British men and women. In 1944 it was made compulsory for local authorities to provide school dinners, and by the 1950s school meals typically consisted of meat, two veg and a traditional pudding. It was a largely balanced diet and, according to a study by the Medical Research Council, post-war four-year-olds had a high calcium and iron intake through greater consumption of bread, milk, greens and potatoes. They also consumed less sugar than children today.

By the 1980s, however, standards had slipped, with meals characterised by an unappetising melange of calorific, processed foods: from semi-circular pizzas and the dreaded Turkey Twizzlers to chocolate concrete. The finger of blame often points to state schools for using private catering companies to provide meals following Margaret Thatcher’s abolition of free dinners.

While school meals have improved significantly since those dark days, it’s hard for schools to shake that negative perception. It’s a problem which Rebecca Clarke, headteacher at Greenleas primary school in Leighton Buzzard, knows only too well. Meals, she says, have evolved beyond recognition from what they were when most parents were at school, but their reputation can precede them. She holds taster sessions for parents of new students to reassure them about the quality of the food provided.

Clarke, who spent a brief stint as a dinner lady when she first joined the school around eight years ago, is eager to bring what she learned from her time in catering to her role as head. Glass serving counters in the dining hall enable all pupils – no matter what their height – to see what they are ordering. Pictures of the dishes on the menu are also on display at the start of the day so students have time to ask any questions about food they are unsure of. This gives the children an opportunity to evaluate their choice of food.

Interacting with the children in this way and including them in the decision making process is the best way to yield positive results, claims chef Ann Cooper. The founder of the Chef Ann Foundation, which runs projects to promote healthy school meals in the USA, claims we need to go beyond simply providing healthy choices in school canteens.

“Healthy eating has to be part of the curriculum and it needs to be taught in every grade,” she insists. “There’s nothing we do more from the day we are born to the day we die than eat. So why shouldn’t it be just as important and supported with just as much education and academic rigour as science or maths and English?”

Cooper believes the biggest challenge, particularly in the USA where prior to 2010 schools were not legally obligated to serve any fresh fruit and vegetables, is to use more food cooked from scratch or whole foods. The Obama administration is making great strides in getting better food into schools, she explains, but many processed ingredients are still being used.

She is optimistic about the future, however, and believes school meals have a bright, multi-coloured future ahead of them.

“We will have more and more fresh fruit and vegetables on the menu in the coming years. Jamie Oliver, myself and chef Alice Waters have all come together for a project called Food Truth to create national food education awareness for children.

“We need to teach children about where our food comes from, and the truth about food. So I think that’s the next big part we need to overcome.”

Trying to change school meals, however, can be an overwhelming task. Cooper’s advice is to start with just one thing and build up gradually. Making those first steps is crucial if we are to combat a global childhood obesity crisis, she says.

Cooper adds: “We are literally killing our kids with processed food and until every person on this planet can get behind the idea that taking care of our kids’ health is the most important thing we can do, we won’t solve the problem.”

The schools of the future series is funded by Zurich Municipal. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled “brought to you by”. Find out more here.