Choice matters more than tuck shops

Does it matter that academy schools are defying Jamie Oliver’s fatwa against sweets? An organisation called the School Food Trust has found 89 of 100 academies guilty of harbouring tuck shops. Selling crisps, chocolate and even cereal bars. The Guardian is shocked and has made the story its page two lead. Schools with tuck shops, says the Trust’s director, ‘should be named and shamed for profiteering at the expense of pupils’ health… Mr Gove is putting ideology above children’s wellbeing’.
 
I plead guilty to having once been behind the counter at the tuck shop of Rosebank Primary in Nairn, blissfully unaware that I was poisoning Highland children with this filth. Had we closed it down, the kids would’ve just bought their sweets from one of the many shops around the school — the shop was there to stop them straying outside the school boundaries. But this isn’t about sweets, of course, but the Guardian’s ideological crusade to keep schools under political control.