A SCHOOL kitchen has been closed after it failed to meet stringent new safety regulations.

Education chiefs admitted that St Andrew's Primary School, in Henknowle, near Bishop Auckland, might not be the only one affected by the change in rules.

David Hutchinson, headteacher, said that his school had been without the facility to cook hot meals for the last two weeks of the summer term.

He said that children had been provided with packed lunches and this would continue for the foreseeable future.

The cooker in the school kitchen has not been fitted with a flame failure device which would shut off the gas supply should the blue flame be blown out.

A spokesman for Durham County Education Authority said that the guidelines were introduced in 1998 and appliances installed afterwards had been fitted with the right equipment.

But now, stricter guidelines insist that all appliances have the device.

The spokesman said: "The new guidelines do not make the cooker or appliance any less safe than they were before, it introduces new requirements to increase the safety.''

The authority is looking at all its schools to make sure that all kitchens are fitted with the correct device.

"We are putting together a report to go to cabinet which will look at this particular problem," he said. "It will look to see if there are similar problems in any other schools and how we will go about solving it. We don't know how many schools are affected."