The benefits of free school lunches are abundantly clear
Some politicians do seem to be in a bit of a pickle about the benefits or otherwise of school lunches. Listening to ACT Party leader David Seymour recently, we could be led to believe that the benefits of feeding kids at school have never been assessed.
This isn’t remotely the case – there’s literally decades of research that show school lunches are an excellent investment, with very high returns to society.
The mechanism used for evaluating these sorts of programmes is Social Return on Investment (SROI), an economic assessment toolkit with strong academic foundations and decades of real-world application.
And one of the early adopters of the methodology was Sir Bill English, who as Minister of Finance was a vocal proponent of using social investment modelling to steer Crown decision making.
The idea of social investment is simple: spend money on early interventions, so the country doesn’t get stuck with the higher costs of avoidable problems further down the track.
As Frederick Douglass, the American escaped slave and statesman, put it: it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults.
And intuitively, this makes sense. We all know that fences at the tops of cliffs are much more effective – and cost effective – than ambulances at the bottom. So the question is, do school lunches fall into this category, or are they merely throwing hard-earned taxpayer dollars away for little effect?
Here at Habilis New Zealand Ltd we’ve used Social Return on Investment to assess all sorts of investments, from infrastructure to forestry to community facilities. And if we apply SROI methodologies to school lunches, the results from across the planet are pretty clear – the societal returns range from around 3 to more than 8. In other words, for every dollar we spend on feeding kids at school, we realise $3-$8 in benefits across the economy.
This is far better than even the most optimistic projections for building another motorway.
What’s disappointing about the recent political discourse is that these studies
There’s literally decades of research that show school lunches are an excellent investment, with very high returns to society.
are a mere Google search away. There are studies from a wide range of countries, across a wide range of communities, covering all levels of social and economic deprivation, a great number of which are directly comparable to our experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand.
They’re consistent in methodology, and consistent in results.
That’s not to say Mr Seymour is on the wrong track about every aspect of school lunches. The studies also tell us that we get the most bang for the buck where economic and social challenges are the greatest, so targeting can be important. And decreasing food waste is always a good thing, irrespective of who is making and eating lunch, from school kids to politicians.
As Mr Seymour suggests, it’s always worthwhile looking at our national programmes and seeing how we can do things better and smarter. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. School lunches for kids who would otherwise go without is absolutely a good investment for the country we are today and the country we wish to be tomorrow.