Principal criticises free lunch allocation amid school complaints

• Hutt Valley principal Wikus Swanepoel wishes his students could receive free lunches from the Government scheme.
• Maidstone Intermediate doesn’t qualify, but 80-90 of its 530 pupils lack nutritious food at home.
• Swanepoel criticises the allocation system, saying it leaves needy students without lunches.

By John Gerritsen of RNZ

A Hutt Valley principal says he wishes some of his students could have the free lunches other schools are complaining about.

Wikus Swanepoel from Maidstone Intermediate told RNZ his school did not qualify for the scheme, but about 80-90 of its 530 pupils did not get enough nutritious food at home and would benefit from it.

The scheme was limited to the schools with the 25% of students with the highest socio-economic need and the move of 466 to a new provider, the School Lunch Collective, had been accompanied by complaints about delivery times and food quality.

Swanepoel said about 30 of his students previously attended a primary school covered by the lunch scheme.

“So for six years they’ve been fed a warm lunch every day now. Three months down the track, a system has decided that they don’t need lunches anymore. Nothing has changed. They’ve got the same socio-economic circumstances ... and now suddenly there’s no lunches for them,” he said.

Asked if he was frustrated or annoyed by other schools' complaints about the School Lunch Collective, Swanepoel said: “Yes, oh yes. Bring it to our school.

“Is the food going to the right people? These people that are so complaining, are they the ones that really need the food? Because there are surely, I know for a fact, there are students who need food,” he said.

Swanepoel said other schools also believed the allocation system was unfair and he knew of one that secretly gave its excess lunches to another school that was not covered by the scheme but had students in need.

“There’s two camps at the moment, the ones who are really angry because they know what they got before and they’re angry with what they get at the moment and then there’s the others who just look and think ‘Oh, if we just could have been on that programme for a number of our kids’,” he said.

He said his school had children from the full range of social backgrounds, which used to be measured by a system that categorised the highest socio-economic need as decile one and the lowest need at decile 10.

“We were the old decile six, but I’ve got from decile one to decile 10 [students]. A quarter of my kids come from beautiful picket fence homes, a mum, a dad, a lovely warm breakfast. A quarter of my kids come from nothing. Nothing in the mornings and they have to come and learn and do an hour of reading, writing and maths.”

Swanepoel said his school had found ways to feed its most needy students, including donations from parents and local businesses.

He said the Education Ministry should talk to schools about who needed free lunches.

Sign up to The Daily H, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.