Many parents can't decide whether to send their children to school with a packed lunch or to buy a school lunch and wonder which would be the healthier option. This depends largely on the quality of the meals your school provides and also what you might choose to put in your child's lunch box. In 2005 the School Food Trust (an organisation that promotes the health of children and young people, by improving the quality of food supplied to and consumed in schools) was set up by the government and has introduced a list of guidelines schools must follow. These include adding in more fruit and vegetables, reducing the salt and sugar content of meals, including oily fish, cutting back on fried foods and so on. (For more information visit the School Food Trust website www.schoolfoodtrust.org.uk)

Before making your decision, speak with your school to find out if they are adhering to these guidelines and ask for a menu and any other information they might have about the dinners they provide. If still unsure, why not visit the school during lunchtime? This way you can not only check out the quality of the food for yourself, you can also see how the whole lunchtime process works. For example, do the children cue, canteen style, for their meals or is the food served to them? Are they allowed to select their main meal and their desert at the same time? If so, are they adequately supervised to see that they do eat their main meal before reaching for dessert and dashing out to play? These are factors parents of children just starting school can over look but are important when ensuring that your child eats an adequate, healthy lunch everyday.

1 cheese and pickle sandwich -28g fat &9g (nearly 2 teaspoons) sugar

1 pot of fruit yoghurt-3.5g fat &20g (4 teaspoons) sugar

1chocolate biscuit -4g fat&5g (1 teaspoon) sugar

1 carton of fruity soft drink -0g fat&20g (4 teaspoons) sugar

1 packet of crisps-10g fat&0g sugar

Total-

45.5g fat (approximately 80% of the fat most children should eat in a day - in just one packed lunch!)

54g sugar (almost 11 teaspoons! This is far more sugar than any child should eat in a whole day, never mind just one meal!)

Instead, try adding interest to lunchboxes by making sandwiches out of a variety of different breads such as mini rolls, pitta breads, tortilla wraps - even mini naan breads filled with cream cheese or hummus and good quality sliced ham can be a winner with kids. Add variation by swapping sandwiches for a mini flask of soup or warm pasta in a tomato sauce. (Kiddies Kitchen http://www.kiddieskitchen.co.uk sell a great little ‛food Jar' flask priced ¬£11.99 that fits snugly inside most standard lunch boxes and keeps food hot for up to 6 hours and has a wide mouth so kids simply unscrew the top and can eat straight from the flask).

Avoid crisps which are high in saturated fat and salt and go for savoury snacks such as bread sticks with dips, mixed nuts and raisins and home-made popcorn. Leave out the sugary, often additive laden drinks in favour of real fruit juice diluted half and half with water and swap chocolate bars for home-made oaty flapjacks or slices of fruit loaf. Increase your child's fruit and vegetable consumption by including mini paper bags filled with grapes, blueberries and raisins or diced apple and cheese in a mini airtight container. Fill celery sticks with peanut butter or cream cheese, add raw vegetable crudités with dips and make your own coleslaw by finely grating apple, carrot and cabbage and mixing together with crème fraiche, chopped walnuts and raisins. Instead of just adding in an apple everyday include a whole variety of different fruits such as Sharon fruit, kiwi fruits cut in half and eaten like a boiled egg with a spoon, a whole peeled satsuma or mini, finger sized banana (available from Tesco) dipped in chocolate, strawberries threaded on a mini wooded skewer or slices of fresh, ripe pineapple wrapped in cling film.

Finally, if you still can't decide which option to take why not opt for school lunches for two or three days of the week and send your daughter with packed lunches on the other days. This can be a great way of keeping lunchtimes interesting and you'll soon find out which your daughter naturally prefers.

Packed lunches can be a healthy option but it depends a great deal on what foods you include. The tried and tested formula of a sandwich of some sort (often with a high fat filling such as cheese, peanut butter or egg mayonnaise) along with a packet of crisps, a chocolate biscuit, a yogurt, a carton of juice and the obligatory apple thrown in (which invariably comes home again, untouched) can amount to a lot of fat and sugar being consumed by your child on a daily basis (see the table below). Foods heavily marketed as being ‛ideal for lunchboxes' can also make matters worse as processed cheeses can be high in salt, novelty yogurts and desserts can be high in sugar as can many pre-packaged drinks and snacks.