School lunches revamp a disaster, principal says

Friday, 14 February 2025

Changes to the free school lunches programme may end up costing the very people it was designed to help, the head of a rural school says.

Murchison Area School principal, Andy Ashworth said the school was considering pulling the pin on the revamped programme, which left food waste “stinking” at school, and staff overloaded.

Instead of the lunches being distributed to classes and cleaned up by their new provider, Ashworth spent two hours doing that himself on the students’ first day back for the year, on Friday.

The provider then didn’t collect the rubbish bags it supplied until Monday, he said.

“We’ve got stinking food, leftovers and everything, left in the classrooms, or … outside.”

While the providers were supposed to collect the bags the next school day, it was unlikely that would happen, with the bags scattered across the school, Ashworth said.

“I’m not asking the teachers to start doing that as well … they’ve got other things to do and they’re entitled to their own break.”

With a roll of just over 200, the school was not big enough to be eligible for government funding for a lunch assistant, Ashworth said.

The money to hire one would have to come out of the school’s operations grant, which schools used for teaching and learning resources, like teacher aides, he said.

“The free school lunches is patently not a free school lunch any more.”

Losing the programme would exacerbate financial hardship for people in the community, and the school board would meet next week to discuss if they could continue with the programme, he said.

“Our families need this additional money-saving and provision of food.”

The Ministry of Education uses its Equity Index to work out which schools are included in the Ka Ora Ka Ako, Healthy School Lunches programme, with the aim of reaching the 25% of students most in need of support.

The meals now cost $3 instead of up to $8.68 to produce, under measures announced by Associate Education Minister David Seymour aimed at cutting the programme’s costs by $130m a year.

Murchison Area School’s lunches used to be made by a café 400 metres away, which delivered the meals in recyclable containers and picked the food waste up.

The meals were now made 800km away in Hamilton under a “School Lunch Collective” of three organisations, and shipped to a kitchen in Tapawera, Ashworth said.

While the quality of the lunches had not been as bad as feared, the logistics and the administration of the programme had been “an absolute disaster”, he said.

For example, unscheduled menu changes meant parents whose children would not eat certain foods, could not plan to give them packed lunches on those days.

Ashworth said the providers said two children with complex needs at his school would not get meals for at least a fortnight, and new, unexpected students weren’t catered for.

“Nobody knows what’s going on.”

The programme’s website wouldn’t let schools change orders, with prolific emails from the School Lunch Collective containing conflicting information, principals said.

Principal of Parklands School in Motueka, Andrea Smith said a school administrator had been “tearing her hair out” over the day-to-day organisation of the programme.

While the school already used one of the collective’s three organisations last year, the school now had to contact the providers via a portal - which wasn’t working properly.

“They’ve added a layer of admin and organisation at the beginning of the year, which we just didn’t need.”

Sean Teddy, the Ministry of Education’s Hautū (Leader) operations and integration said the ministry had limited ability to support schools with their on-site management of school lunches.

The ministry was providing grant funding to support the distribution of meals within schools with rolls larger than 350 for Term 1 and 2 this year. Schools could choose how the grant was used to support their preferred lunch distribution method, either through their own staffing resource or by subcontracting the School Lunch Collective.

Over the next few months, the ministry would work with schools and Kura to develop a long-term cost-efficient distribution solution.

Teddy said schools had been asked to check the aluminium trays were clear of the film cover and as clean as possible when placed into their insulated carriers for pick up.

The lunch trays were fully recyclable. Drivers collected the previous day’s lunch trays and took them back to the central production kitchen, where a third party provider collected them before being returned Hamilton.

Teddy acknowledged the changes associated with the new contract had been frustrating for some schools.

He said for a range of reasons, including supply chain factors, short notice changes to the menu were sometimes required by the School Lunch Collective. The need for these short notice menu changes was expected to reduce.

He said the new portal had generally been operating well, and its functionality was being enhanced.

Information provided by the SLC showed that on-time delivery in the Buller/Greymouth area which supplied Murchison Area School has been at 100% since February 4.