What's for lunch: Mana College
Tuesday, 23 January 2024
With full bellies and an added incentive to come to school, educators routinely praise the Ka Ora, Ka Ako ‒ Healthy Lunches Programme which caters to more than 230,000 students at close to 1000 schools and kura around Aotearoa.
In 2023, the programme provided more than a million lunches to students at 25% of schools and kura facing the greatest socio-economic barriers nationally each week.
Having only secured funding through to the end of the year, and with political appetite from the Government varying, its future is uncertain.
Education reporter Gianina Schwanecke talks to Mana College’s assistant principal, Jeff Chapman, about what's for lunch.
Are the lunches provided in-house or by external providers?
Lunches are prepared on-site by Waitoa Catering which also caters to other schools in the area. We have about 450 to 500 students accessing the lunches at our school.
What's on the menu?
It’s not the same thing every week ‒ it’s on a four-week rotation. Anything that’s hot is a favourite, especially in winter. There’s spaghetti meatballs, pizza, chicken chop suey, and a few pasta bakes.
What is food insecurity like at your school?
It was totally arbitrary and random. Some kids would be fully catered for with healthy options and others would have absolutely nothing.
What difference has the programme made for your school?
It’s definitely been a game changer and makes it more equitable. Now the kids have the same lunches and we know they’re getting healthy food, not just pies from the canteen. And there’s plenty of it.
There’s also the social aspect because they come together in their learning advisory (like a form class) and they spend time eating and talking together.
It would be terrible to have it go, to go back to what we had would be a step backwards when we know that it works.
What does the school do to minimise waste? What does it do with leftover lunches?
If a lunch doesn’t get eaten it’s shared out for other kids to have it. Because of how we cater lunches, we can adjust the numbers around attendance and events like sports tournaments when students are away.