Children at 50 schools in Oxfordshire are to be served frozen meals in a continued drive to cut costs.

The move, which will mean some dinner ladies losing their jobs, will save cash-starved Oxfordshire County Council up to £200,000 a year.

The cost of refurbishing run-down school kitchens led education chiefs to look at alternative ways of providing the 20,000 school dinners served in Oxfordshire each day.

Earlier this year, 120 school kitchens were converted into 'serveries' and now re-heat hot food cooked in other schools nearby.

Under the frozen meals system - or Delivered Meals System (DMS) - food will be cooked and frozen by central suppliers. It will then be delivered to schools in chilled containers, placed in freezers and heated-up in special trolleys. The system has proved successful in trials at seven schools since the beginning of the autumn term and is expected to be introduced in another 43 next year. About 130 schools will continue to cook meals in kitchens on site.

Roy Smith, the county's deputy chief education officer, said: "A large number of kitchens need quite a lot of repairs in order to bring them up to health and safety standards.

"With the frozen meals system, the operating costs are less and it is more efficient. It will save us hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.

"The system has been largely successful in trials and the turnover has actually increased."

Sarah Varnom, head of one of the trial schools, Cumnor Primary, said it was serving ten per cent more school dinners under the new system.

She said: "I was quite sceptical in the beginning, but I have been pleasantly surprised." It is not a case of simply reheating individual meals, food is frozen and then cooked in special trolleys like a pressure cooker.

"The choice is not only greater, but the food is of a higher quality."

The council originally estimated that 120 dinner ladies would be made redundant under the school dinner cuts.

However, news of the cuts led to many finding new jobs. The frozen meals system also requires more staff than the serveries because some cooking is still involved.

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