Reform’s answer to school food policy is “personal responsibility”. It sounds solid until you notice who is meant to be exercising it. Children, in a setting where the menu is fixed and the alternatives are limited or non existent. Schools decide what is served. For many pupils, particularly those on free school meals, that is the only option. There is no meaningful choice to take responsibility for.
Even where there is a choice, it is a rather artificial one. Put a child in front of something sweet, salty and immediately rewarding, and something plainer but nutritious, and the outcome is not a moral test. It is a predictable result of how people, especially children, are wired. Impulse wins. Calling that “personal responsibility” does not make it so, it just shifts the blame onto the child for behaving exactly as expected.
The government proposal starts from that reality and tries to improve what is actually put on the plate. You can argue about where the line should be drawn, but it at least recognises that outcomes are shaped by the system. Reform’s position sidesteps that entirely. It removes responsibility from the system and places it on individuals who cannot act on it.
There is also a basic inconsistency. Reform are not calling for schools to abandon rules in general. Behaviour, attendance and safeguarding are all tightly regulated, for obvious reasons. The idea that diet alone should be exempt suggests this is not a consistent principle about freedom, but a selective objection to this particular type of intervention.
And the consequences are not abstract. Diet in childhood is linked to obesity, long term health, and educational performance. Saying “they should choose better” does not alter that. It simply declines to engage with it.
In practice, nothing changes except the rhetoric. The menu stays as it is, the outcomes stay as they are, and the responsibility is reassigned to the one person in the room with the least control over any of it: the child standing in a lunch queue.
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