Can mini cheddars really get you thrown out of school?

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Some time back, two young children (brothers) were expelled from a British school because they had packets of “mini cheddars” in their lunch boxes, and this was contrary to the school’s policy on healthy eating. For the uninitiated, mini cheddars are small cheese-flavoured biscuits that also have a high salt content. This story, as reported, did sound to be a case of an extreme reaction on the part of the school. There are certainly legitimate reasons why a child might be barred from attending school, but intending to eat salty cheese biscuits for lunch is surely not one of them? However, I reckon that this must be one of those incidents in which the whole story is not being told. It is hard to believe that a teacher or dinner lady watched a child about to eat an unapproved food item and dragged them off to the head teacher whom promptly threw them out of the school and told them not to come back. Surely there must be more to it than that? One wonders if this was the latest in a whole string of offences that the children – or more probably their parents – had committed in contravention of the school’s policy. Had they been warned in the past that they were giving their children unhealthy food but simply chose to ignore those warnings? We also don’t know what else was in those lunch boxes. Did they have healthy sandwiches, an apple and a yoghurt as well as their mini cheddars? Or did their lunch consist solely of junk food to be washed down with a can of non-diet Coke? There may also have been more to the incident than merely the discovery of the mini cheddars. Did mum turn up at the school to argue the case with the head teacher, and were things said that should not have been said? We simply don’t know. Another unknown is how balanced the children’s diet is in general terms. What do they eat at home for example? There is nothing wrong with eating mini cheddars if they only represent a minor part of one’s diet, but if they are eaten in large quantities, every day, that is another matter. There is also the matter of how other children might react if some individuals are apparently allowed to get away with bringing unhealthy food to school but they are not. A school can hardly have a policy that is not observed by all the children in its care. As I say, there was probably a lot more in this story that we were not told. Unfortunately, that is true of an awful lot that we read in the papers and which people then tend to take at face value.