Pippa McKelvie-Sebileau, left, and Hastings Girls' High Principal Catherine Bentley enjoying lunch with students last year. Bentley has invited ACT leader David Seymour to visit and speak with students to see and hear the benefits of free school lunches. Photo / Warren Buckland
Pippa McKelvie-Sebileau, left, and Hastings Girls' High Principal Catherine Bentley enjoying lunch with students last year. Bentley has invited ACT leader David Seymour to visit and speak with students to see and hear the benefits of free school lunches. Photo / Warren Buckland
A Hawke’s Bay school fearful the government will pull funding on free school lunches has invited Act leader David Seymour to visit students to see and hear the benefits.
Advocates for Ka Ora, Ka Ako, Aotearoa’s free school lunch programme, say data shows teen students who missedmeals as they could not afford them were up to four years behind their peers in their learning.
Hastings Girls’ High School provides free breakfasts, soup at intervals and hot lunches daily for its students through an internal model under Ka Ora, Ka Ako.
Principal Catherine Bentley invited Seymour to have lunch with her students and speak to them directly about the programme’s benefits.
Free school lunches were a “game changer” and the looming threat of funding going away was “criminal”, she said.
“Our NCEA results continue to climb, despite Covid, despite a cyclone that impacted the community, and the biggest difference is for our Māori and Pasifika learners. It is due to multiple things, but lunch in schools is absolutely part of that,” Bentley said.
Treasury officials told previous finance minister Grant Robertson many of the meals had been wasted, but Bentley said there was no waste at her school.
“We produce all of our food on-site, so it is higher quality and we are not paying a middleman,” she said.
“I agree that there is work to be done into streamlining [across the country], however, [Seymour] needs to take a look at where it is working well, learn from it and then apply it across the motu so that every student gets the sort of lunches that our students get.”
ACT leader and associate education minister David Seymour has reiterated that free school lunches are a serious issue and he will visit schools to see the programme in action. Photo / Michael Craig
Seymour has reiterated that free school lunches are a serious issue and he will be visiting schools this week to see the programme in action.
“We also need to consider the wider facts before committing to spending hundreds of millions of dollars. In the few years that the programme has been in place, outcomes like attendance and achievement have gotten worse,” Seymour said.
He said many teachers and caregivers had contacted him about the programme.
“While some are supportive of the programme, many raise concerns about the huge amounts of wasted food and money being spent.”
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at Flaxmere Primary School in 2020 for the launch of a daily lunch programme. Photo / Paul Taylor
Hawke’s Bay researcher Dr Pippa McKelvie-Sebileau said the 2022 Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) data showed achievement for students who miss meals due to lack of money was two to four years behind their peers who never miss meals.
McKelvie-Sebileau is involved in research undertaken as part of the Nourishing HB: He wairua tō te kai collaboration between the University of Auckland and EIT - Te Pūkenga, into the impact of Ka Ora, Ka Ako.
The PISA data showed that 14 per cent of students were missing a meal at least once a week, and 6.5 per cent missed meals more than four times, which made NZ the second worst of 25 OECD countries.
“If they have missed a meal just once a week, students are already down 40 points on the PISA scale, which is two years of learning because 20 points is about one average year of learning,” McKelvie-Sebileau said.
“Students who say they are missing a meal every day, their learning is about 80 points or four years behind.”
She said data previously collected and evaluated by the government on the impact of free school lunches was from 2021, which was too early to measure the impact of the programme.
It was also shortly after Covid lockdowns which had impacted attendance.
She said there had been demonstrable success in reducing food insecurity, which was the original stated goal of Ka Ora, Ka Ako.
James Pocock joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2021 and writes breaking news and features, with a focus on environment, local government and post-cyclone issues in the region. He has a keen interest in finding the bigger picture in research and making it more accessible to audiences. He lives in Napier. james.pocock@nzme.co.nz
