New school lunch programme pushing extra costs onto high schools, principal says

Sunday, 9 February 2025

Costs cut from the school lunch programme have been shifted to large high schools, the president of the Secondary Principals Association of NZ says.

In the old system, lunch providers distributed meals directly to students.

Now, meals are simply delivered to schools, with large high schools bearing the cost of distributing hundreds of lunches to students, he said.

Changes in the school lunch programme have pushed costs onto large high schools, the president of the Secondary Principals Association of New Zealand, Vaughan Couillault, says.

Late deliveries and missing meals plagued the revamped Ka Ora Ka Ako lunch scheme last week as schools began the new year, and logistical problems continued this week.

Couillault, principal of Papatoetoe High School, applauded the savings made on lunches, but said extra costs have been pushed onto high schools that need to employ extra staff to handle distributing meals once they have been delivered.

Previously, suppliers distributed lunches directly to students within schools.

“What the minister hasn’t thought about, or Cabinet hasn’t thought about, is that distribution time,” Couillault said.

How is the school lunch programme going at your school? Send your comments and photos to newstips@stuff.co.nz

At Papatoetoe High School, there were no complaints about the quality of the meals, he said. The issue was with the 1600 meals that arrive needing to be sorted into boxes for the 70 form classes where they were handed out.

“That’s logistically quite a lot. And then those boxes need to come back when the kids have eaten.”

Couillaut refers to the tidy up as “rubbish bin admin”.

The aluminium trays meals are delivered in are returned to the School Lunch Collective for recycling. “So you’ve got to make sure all the trays don’t have anything in them, stack them up.”

That would be easier in a primary school setting where the teacher is with the class for the day, but at high schools there is a limited time window when students are in their form class, he said.

His school has employed five people who are currently working four hours a day to help with the set up and then the tidy up, he said.

Once the programme has settled in, he expects the time required to reduce to around 12 hours labour a day, but it’s a cost the school is not funded for, he said.

Interim funding of $210/day is in place until the end of term two, but that won’t cover the hours needed, he said.

“All that happens there is the reduced cost to provide the lunch assistance shifted back onto the big schools.

“We value the programme, it’s great, and we understand that there could have been some fat taken out of the system in terms of funding previously, but I don’t think we can continue to overlook the distribution and clean-up costs that schools are going to have to bear themselves,” Couillault said.

Schools in the lunch programme won’t be able to spend that money on teaching and learning, which creates further inequity in terms of access to teacher resources, he said.

Principal of Auckland Girls’ Grammar School, Ngaire Ashmore, said the number of staff working on food distribution and rubbish collection was more than the funding provided.

Asked if additional funds would be provided to large schools that need to employ people to handle the meals and packaging, Associate Minister of Education David Seymour referred the question to the Education Ministry.

Education Ministry hautū (leader) operations and integration, Sean Teddy, said schools with a roll of 350 and more had been provided additional funding support to pay for staff to assist with the distribution of lunches.

“The ministry will work with schools and continue to assess how we can best support the distribution of meals in future,” Teddy said.

Meanwhile, schools in Auckland are still reporting problems with meal deliveries.

After not turning up at all on Monday, school lunches arrived 10 minutes before the end of the day on Tuesday at Sutton Park School in Auckland’s Māngere East.

When the truck arrived at 2.50pm on Tuesday, it was not possible to deal with the meals in the time left before the end of the day, principal Vaitimu Togi Lemanu said.

“I said you can turn around and take your lunch back, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

On Wednesday, enough meals arrived for Year 1 to 4 students, but there were not enough for all children in Year 5 to 8 classes, he said.

By Friday, things had improved, with regular lunches arriving early, and the school only short on special meals.

Couillaut said most of the issues around the delivery of the lunches were in Auckland, where there are complexities not just with Auckland traffic, “but the hyper diversity of the dietary needs of kids in Auckland”.

About 40% of Couillaut’s school’s population is halal, with differences with what is considered halal.

“If you pop down to, say, schools in Invercargill, the diversity of ethnicity across your school campus would be a lot narrower than say mine, which is outrageously diverse, not only in terms of ethnicity but religious jurisdiction.”

On Wednesday, Seymour said The School Lunch Collective had delivered over 538,000 meals to students across the country since schools opened for the year.

“The School Lunch Collective have committed to the largest food providing service in the country, and they are doing a good job,” he said.

“There have been ongoing issues in Auckland and some in Waikato which affected delivery of lunches to schools. Most other regions have had 100% of lunches delivered on time in recent days.”

In response to the problems, the collective has expanded its delivery fleet, brought in logistics expertise from Foodstuffs to review routes, increased the number of production kitchens in Auckland, and started heating meals earlier, he said.

A new supplier of special dietary meals will also join the collective to resolve supply and labelling problems, and an 0800 number will be added to the collective’s contact centre from next week, Seymour said.