Dinners at Church Cowley St James Primary School in Oxford are cooked at another school, delivered in little "coffins" and left in a cupboard to cool and congeal for an hour or two before being dished up.

If there isn't enough to go round: no problem, they just reduce the portions. This is one of the reasons the school has decided to ditch Oxfordshire's in-house catering service, County Facilities Management, and give its school dinners a revamp.

Sue Gonzales, who has already transformed school meals at Oxford Community School and Cheney School, Headington, will take over responsibility for food at the primary school from September.

The kitchen will undergo a £25,000 revamp and a new healthy menu will be introduced to coax more of the 400 pupils to use the canteen. At the moment, only 60 pupils take school meals.

Some fresh food will be prepared on site and hot meals will be delivered. The school council has been driving some of the changes because, in their own words, "the chips are like steel, hard and cold and the portions can be very small yet the prices still go up".

Luke Souch, 11, secretary of the school council, said: "We don't think that the food is healthy because there are not enough vegetables, too much salt and the sausages are greasy.

"Some people have stopped having school dinners because they are too fatty and they don't enjoy them any more.

"We spend a lot of time lining up waiting for meals that are sometimes cold and don't taste of much. We really want to change our school dinners to make them healthier."

Since September last year at least 20 out of the county's 34 secondary schools and 224 out of the county's 260 nursery, primary and special schools have decided to go it alone.

CFM is undergoing a radical overhaul in a bid to provide a healthier meals service which primary, nursery and special schools can buy into.

But Church Cowley St James headteacher Tom Walker has detected little improvement so far. He said: "There have been some changes over the last 12 months: less processed food, more veg, but portion sizes, temperature of the food and the general quality has not improved.

"The one thing we've noticed is that there are no Turkey Twizzlers any more. I'm sad to say I'm not optimistic that CFM will improve.

"Sue has got such vision and we're confident the quality of food is going to improve dramatically."

The school will celebrate the launch of its new menu at a food evening next week.