Public Purse: Why so many of NZ’s neediest school children could be missing out on a free school lunch

OPINION:

The Public Purse is a new fortnightly Herald column focused on the public sector and how taxpayer money is spent.

The cost of free school lunches is up to $325 million a year and best estimates are that we’re feeding fewer than half the hungry school children in New Zealand.

We’re not talking about the kids who are casually, noonishly hungry. The kids we’re missing are in a category of hardship the Government calls food insecure. And it means they come from homes where often or sometimes there is just not enough to eat.

Incidentally, we don’t come by this data through the Ministry of Education (MoE). It’s feeding some 224,000 children, about a quarter of the school roll, but it’s not keeping track of the needy kids missing out. When the Herald inquired, the ministry pointed to the University of Auckland’s most recent Growing Up in New Zealand report called Now we are 12.

That work, which is particular to 12-year olds, found that just 45 per cent of 12 year-olds who are moderately or severely food insecure receive the Government lunches “most” or “every” school day.

Those who are moderately food insecure live in homes where food runs out sometimes. Those who are severely food insecure live in homes where food runs out often.

In contrast, 51 per cent of food-insecure 12-year olds never received the lunches. Some 4 per cent received them infrequently.

The Growing Up work is an imperfect gauge. It’s focused on Auckland and the Waikato and when the data was collected - September 2021 to July 2022 - the lunch programme was present “in most, but not all, of the schools it is in currently”, according to the Ministry of Education. It says actual coverage may be higher. It’s particular to a single year group. But it’s sobering.

Less than half of 12-year-olds who are moderately or severely food insecure receive the Government lunches most days. Photo / AP, Rui Vieira

Extrapolating from it gives a rough figure of 138,000 food insecure school kids, some 70,000 of whom are completely missed by the school lunches.

You might think this would be reason enough for Minister of Education Jan Tinetti to ask her officials to produce their own determination.

She is, after all, also Minister for Child Poverty Reduction, and, if you take her child poverty officials at their word, food insecurity is pernicious. It’s linked to immediate and long-term ill-health, childhood obesity, poor academic performance, and developmental and behavioural problems. What’s more, these miserable effects can stalk those who suffer them through adult life.

If it’s worth shouting chicken wraps and pasta salad for anyone, you’d think it would be for these kids.

Indeed, tackling food insecurity does appear to be the main purpose of the free lunch programme. When then-Education Minister Chris Hipkins asked his Cabinet colleagues to approve funding for the pilot free lunch programme back in 2019 he told them: “The primary impact would be reduced food insecurity among children from disadvantaged households.”

“In turn,” he went on, “reduction in the cost of basic needs for some of our most disadvantaged households is likely to have a positive impact on material hardship, and help address barriers to children’s participation in education and wider society.” He also promised to gather real-time evaluative information.

Jan Tinetti speaks about her first 100 days as Education Minister. Photo / Alex Cairns

Tinetti told the Herald that: “addressing the impact of food insecurity is a major aim of the free school lunches initiative. But it is not the only benefit that the programme provides. The universal approach (all the kids in a school having access to a free lunch) helps to build a sense of community, and it importantly reduces stigma for students and their families around food insecurity.”

And there’s the rub. The programme is offered in the 25 per cent of New Zealand schools which show the highest levels of deprivation on the MoE’s Equity Index. It cannot be spread further, because it must be offered universally in the schools wherein it’s served. To do otherwise, Tinetti and the Government say, would shame the needy children. Consequently, the programme is overwhelming feeding a majority of kids who would otherwise simply be eating a bought lunch or food from home.

Many New Zealand academics line up with the Government on the issue of shame. Boyd Swinburn, professor of population nutrition and global health at the University of Auckland and co-chairman of the Health Coalition Aotearoa, told the Herald that missing the majority of the neediest children is hugely problematic, but he stoutly rejected any possibility for greater targeting (means testing for example, unless it could be done inconspicuously, which he doubted).

The result, he said, would be a cascade of damage including stigma, outrage amongst schools which currently receive the lunches in universal fashion, diminished well-being, and fruit and vegetable eating, for all the children currently getting the lunches, and more.

The only practical solution, he said, is to double the programme. It would reach more, though still not all, the needy children, and it would build on the broader gains already made.

It is an academic’s answer. Never mind that the price tag would hit $650m a year (for scale, that’s more than half of Pharmac’s annual budget for the country’s medicines). And the cost of lunches, even at the current level, is not built into the Government’s fiscal projections, for debt for example. That’s because the programme has only ever been funded with one-off money, most of it from the Covid Response and Recovery Fund.

In the May Budget, the Government provided the programme with only a thin 12 months of additional funds to carry it through to the end of calendar year 2024. Official documents show the Treasury remains unconvinced of the value of the programme, especially in light of evaluations that show mixed benefits for students and no effect on school attendance.

To make the programme permanent in Budget 2024, at double its scale, would gobble up nearly two-thirds of the operating allowance for net new spending, currently capped at $3.5b.

It is, of course, possible that the next Government will scrap this cap, blow the budget, and buy more lunch. But the large parties have no appetite for it, and the mood of the country, soon to be tested, is likely not for ballooning spending.

There are considerable problems with Swinburn’s argument too, not the least of which is it assumes shame cannot be avoided or mitigated in further targeting, and, crucially, that the cost of this shame for a needy child outweighs the benefit of reliably receiving lunch. That sounds like a helping of rhubarb.

But it’s one that Tinetti is happy to swallow. She confirmed that the MoE officials have not provided any specific advice on how to feed the country’s needy school children within the free school lunches budget. Which isn’t surprising. She hasn’t asked them to.

Kate MacNamara is a South Island-based journalist with a focus on policy, public spending and investigations. She spent a decade at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before moving to New Zealand. She joined the Herald in 2020.