SCHOOL dinners are to be improved in ambitious plans to add quality but prices are set to rise.

Councillors are expected to vote tonight to make improvements, after a report found cooking skills had declined and the pre-processed meals are unpopular.

Primary school meals in Lewisham borough will go up from £1.10 to £1.25, and secondary school pupils' meals will also rise 15p to £1.70.

A council report says although Lewisham's school dinners are among the cheapest in London, too few pupils are buying them and instead bring in packed lunches which do not give them the right balance of nutrition.

School meals in Lewisham are provided by a 10-year Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract with Scolarest which runs until 2009. The firm has been in the news recently because of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's national campaign to improve school dinners.

He criticised schools serving "junk" food to kids, such as the now infamous turkey twizzlers.

However, Lewisham Council's review of its school food started several months before the Channel 4 TV show School Dinners saw the celebrity chef tackling the problem in Greenwich.

Councillors are expected to vote tonight to make the changes to school meals starting in September this year.

The planned changes will see an end to reliance on pre-processed food with meals freshly prepared on site thanks to training for kitchen staff.

The council currently spends £5.8m a year on school meals, but the improvements will see a budget increase of £654,000, although the council hopes to recoup some of the money through a Government grant.

Telegraph Hill councillor Helen LeFevre is a member of Local Education Action by Parents (LEAP), a group which campaigns for better standards in schools.

She said: "I'm delighted that improvements are going to be made, they are long overdue. But the real challenge is to find a way to keep secondary school pupils in school at lunchtime, by providing enough activities and supervision.

"At the moment many go out and spend their dinner money on fast food."