KEY POINTS:
Up to 15,000 primary pupils will start the new school year today on empty stomachs, says a charity that gives food to hungry children.
KidsCan secretary Carl Sunderland said the experience of feeding 3000 children a week and research by the Poverty Action Group suggested more than 10 per cent of the 125,000 primary-age children in the country's poorest schools were malnourished and needed food to improve their ability to learn.
National Party leader John Key announced plans at the weekend for a Food for Schools programme, and cited the school closest to Auckland's so-called "dead-end street", McGehan Close, as the first target.
But Wesley Primary principal Rae Parkin said the school did not need or want the free lunch and breakfast programme.
Mr Key said the success of the Government's Fruit in Schools programme and the expanding KidsCan charity, which provides food to 31 schools in low-income areas, showed "there is unquestionably a need".
Fruit in Schools, started in 2005, gives children in selected schools one piece of fruit a day.
In October, Health Minister Pete Hodgson said the programme would be extended to 154 new primary schools.
The principal of Western Heights Primary in Rotorua, Brent Griffin, said between 50 and 70 of the school's 385 children arrived at school each day without enough food.
Only a few left home without lunch, but some had no breakfast and ate their lunch on the way to school.
Others arrived with inadequate lunches.
Mr Griffin said food from KidsCan was given discreetly by teachers to hungry children at morning tea and lunchtime.
The sugar-free pottles of fruit salad and muesli-type protein bars were a good top up "and the kids love it too".
He said the school gave up on a Government-financed breakfast club about five years ago because people who were not needy were taking advantage of it.
Child Poverty Action Group director Janfrie Wakim said the hungry children were a manifestation of deeper problems, including inadequate income.
"You have all sorts of things available to certain people because of adequate income and excluded from some people simply because they don't have enough."
Parents on low incomes often had extremely difficult lives.
"They are making all sorts of very difficult decisions without the choice of having adequate income to make maybe wiser decisions that people who are more comfortable would make judgments about. We have to be careful about blaming victims here."
KidsCan general manager Julie Helson said she had been contacted by two schools in Auckland and social workers in Kaipara and Christchurch yesterday keen to join the "Kids for Food" programme.
One of the schools, De La Salle College in Mangere East, had 25 students needing help, she said.
Malcolm Milner, president of the Auckland Primary Principals' Association, said hungry children lacked energy and this could hinder their learning.
"The key thing is, as a society, we should be ensuring that our children are ready to learn when they come in the school gate," Mr Milner said.
Education Minister Steve Maharey said he had not seen the research by KidsCan or Poverty Action on the numbers of hungry children but it appeared to be guesswork from people extrapolating their experience.
Mr Maharey said there were children whose parents did not feed them properly but the incidence of that had declined because of "enormously successful" Government programmes.
Mr Maharey said low-income parents were keen to look after their children as best they could and "don't need this kind of patronising attitude that comes from people like John Key who never go near them except for publicity stunts".
He said allegations by Mr Key that Labour pressured Wesley Primary School into rejecting free food were untrue and insulting, and the National leader should apologise for them.
"That school has an enormous amount of help and the parents are good parents," Mr Maharey said.
"It is a strong local community and the school was deeply insulted by the thought that its parents were going to get a national profile for not feeding their kids when they went to school."
Mr Key yesterday said he stood by his claim that that Wesley came under Labour Party pressure.
He said Mrs Parkin told him the school bought lunch for some hungry children.
But Mrs Parkin said there was no need for free food.
"We don't have large numbers of children without food."
Mr Key said the change could have come from the school's board of trustees, "but it's much more likely there's been influence from the [Education] Ministry, via the Government".
"This school has been heavied by someone with a political agenda," he said.
"Unless we find a way around that, kids in need are going to miss out.
"We are calling on businesses that want to support the programme to contact us, and for schools that want support to contact us, and we're proposing to take the scheme forward on an anonymous basis.
"We won't publicly identify the schools that are part of the programme."
He cited Victoria University research in 2004 which found that a third of Wellington primary schools referred children to social workers or nurses over concerns that they were regularly hungry.
The study showed:
* Nearly 1500 children in the Wellington region went to school without having breakfast, and a further 437 often didn't take lunch.
* Almost three-quarters of schools in the area sometimes gave children food, and 11 gave food daily.
* More than 80 per cent of principals in low-income areas said children at their schools sometimes stayed away from classes because they had not been fed.
National is today meeting Tasti Products - which makes cereals, dried fruits and other food products - to discuss how to set up the free food proposal.
- additional reporting: Maggie McNaughton
