Lancashire County Council, which provides 65,000 meals a day, said schools would focus on providing jacket potatoes, soups and sandwiches rather than a full menu.

Jayne Rear, the county council’s cabinet member for education and skills, said: “We’re reducing the menu for all our schools to make it fair for everybody. It has been so, so difficult to recruit drivers, and it is across the country, and we are doing all we can.”

Parents in other areas have been told to send their children into school with their own snacks. Downland School in Devizes, Wiltshire, said teachers had been forced to buy food at the local supermarket “to make sure all our pupils are fed”.

Jacquie Baker, the chairman of LACA, the professional body for school caterers, said members were “managing to cope quite well” but warned that schools would face increasing challenges unless the lorry driver shortage was brought to a swift end.

“At the moment we are mostly seeing substitutions rather than reduced menus, for meat and fruit and products like that,” she said. “But if this continues for any long period of time, it’s going to become difficult.”

Meanwhile, it emerged that only 127 foreign drivers had applied for 300 visas made available by the Government last month in the hope of tackling the shortages. Of those, only 27 were for fuel tanker drivers.