A DORCHESTER school is stepping up its efforts to become one of the country's healthiest schools.

Damers First School, in Damers Road, is one of the first primary schools in Dorset to begin serving hot meals after years of packed lunches.

Home-made packed lunches could be a thing of the past as Dorset schoolchildren are instead offered chilli con carne and chicken korma.

Headteacher Catherine Lehal hopes the new hot lunches will offer pupils a healthier lifestyle.

A spokesman for Scholarest, the company providing the meals, said the lunches would be pressure steam cooked to retain a high level of nutrients.

Dorset County Council is embarking upon a plan so that, by 2008, every child aged between four and nine who wants a hot meal at school should have access to one.

The move comes after celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's campaign to improve the standards of school meals, which prompted the Government to plough £280 million into providing school meals.

A spokesman for Dorset County Council said: "For Dorset, the task is daunting."

They said that, following a reallocation of the school meals budget in the 1980s, there are only two Dorset primary schools with kitchens.

Mrs Lehal said they were delighted' to be taking part in the pilot scheme.

She said the school had recently had new equipment added to the kitchen in preparation for the new scheme, which starts next month.

Parents will be able to choose whether their children continue to take a packed lunch to school or pay for a hot meal, although there is help available for parents in receipt of benefits.

Damers First School, which was commended in a recent Ofsted report for its promotion of healthy values, and St Andrew's School Primary School, Preston, will be the first two primary schools in Dorset to reintroduce hot meal provision for pupils.

Mrs Lehal said: "We are thinking of even more ideas to make our school an even healthier one.

"We have always known, even before Jamie Oliver, that what children eat makes a difference."

She said they were also considering introducing 10p fruit snacks at playtime to encourage healthy eating even more.