Teachers, unions and education leaders are preparing for a shake-up in the school meals service.

As previously reported, Cumbria County Council is looking for ways to improve the council-subsidised service, which provides thousands of children across the region with dishes from meatballs to Shepherd's pie every day.

Options include:

l Continuing central management of meals service and increasing budgets in line with rising costs of meal provision.

l Continuing central management of meals service but funding each school according to their individual meal-provision costs.

l Delegating the school meals budget to individual schools.

Consultation is under way and a decision is set to be made by CCC cabinet in December.

Education spokesman Joan Stocker praised work being done by Cumbria Contract Services to improve the school meals service and increase take-up and added price would not be the only consideration for the future provision of school meals.

"The nutrition and size of a school meal will not be compromised," she said.