Stuff: Ardern’s low-key school food revolution

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On a grey midday at Mana College, brightly coloured trolleys begin to appear outside classrooms, bearing crates of food. It’s the latest instalment of the free lunches programme, a signature Jacinda Ardern policy that feeds 220,000 children in low-decile schools across the country.

Mana’s acting principal, Greg Sharland, tells me the lunches have been “a real game-changer” in a school that previously had pupils going hungry or subsisting on the cheapest junk food. In times of poverty and rising prices, families’ food budgets often suffer. “Having a good, healthy, packed lunch is really challenging for some of our students,” he says. “This has broken down some of those barriers for us.”

Eloise Bason, a senior pupil, agrees. A typical lunch now might be teriyaki chicken and rice with vegetables, or a bean and roast beef burrito, with fruit to follow. “Personally, I have been really enjoying school lunches. I have found them very balanced [nutritionally].”

Ardern’s scheme has a twofold rationale. It ensures the country’s poorest children are fed, but is also designed to raise school results. Hungry kids make poor learners: a recent evidence review found that school food programmes, commonplace in other countries, lift pupils’ marks.

The first national evaluation of Ardern’s version, published last year, had too little data to make claims about attendance or grades. (Further research is under way.) But it found pupils had better diets, felt more settled, and were far less hungry.

Sharland says that, although the ravages of Covid have rendered rigorous evaluation impossible, anecdotally the scheme is raising achievement. “It definitely helps with energy levels in our last period classes,” Bason adds.

At nearby Porirua College, principal Ragne Maxwell is another enthusiast. “In all the years of educational initiatives [I’ve seen], this is the one that has made the single biggest difference for our kids,” she says. Their eating habits have changed – “they aren’t filling up on pies and $1 bottles of fizzy drink” – and having fewer hungry and “wired-up” kids means fewer playground incidents.

She even thinks it’s reducing obesity. “It’s phenomenal in terms of well-being.”

The programme’s success is all the more startling given this Government’s struggles to deliver core policies and its tendency to fold under political pressure. Not that long ago, conservatives were ardently opposed to a scheme that, as they saw it, trespassed on to an area of parental responsibility and let lazy families off the hook.

But once Ardern made it clear she was undaunted by this anger, it rapidly melted away, leaving the political landscape permanently changed. (One wonders what such staunchness might have achieved elsewhere.)

It helped that there were overseas models to emulate. The scheme’s design, too, has been near-ideal: it was piloted first, then adjusted; it provides lunches to all children at qualifying schools, removing stigma; and it is flexible, so that the 170-odd schools with working canteens can make their own lunches, while the remaining 700 or so buy them in. Big change, done slowly: it’s how the “radically incremental” Ardern government was supposed to work, but mostly hasn’t.

The scheme’s early weakness was waste: news reports detailed thousands of meals going uneaten. But the problem seems to have been brought under control. At Mana, the caterer surveys students and tweaks the meals. “We haven’t seen the tuna wrap back on the menu,” Sharland says wryly.

Official data from a small sample of schools suggest just 10% of meals are wasted. Many parents, contemplating the mouldy packed lunches they have discovered under their child’s bed, will feel that nine from 10 is a decent hit rate.

The scheme’s left-wing critics sometimes claim it would be redundant if the Government had solved child poverty. But it is, Sharland says, “about so much more than just having food in your belly”. Students and teachers eat together. “It’s an opportunity … to connect – particularly in this Covid world, where we have found connection difficult.”

It’s also “a great way to educate people”. Showing beats telling: “It’s easy to say, ‘You should eat more healthily’, but what does that look like? Now they are [seeing] it every day.”

Maxwell agrees. “It’s part of building whānau and learning about appropriate eating – that it isn’t always about sitting in front of the TV.” She reframes a conservative talking point: “You are not just giving them fish, you are teaching them about fishing.”

Porirua College makes its own lunches; Sharland hopes an upcoming refurbishment will allow Mana to do likewise. From there, he envisages a quiet revolution that the Government itself has perhaps only glimpsed.

The free lunches could, in time, become the hub of a holistic, interconnected system in which the school grows some of its own food, pupils help prepare it, and that work earns them qualifications. “We’d love to do that,” he says.