$478m promised for free school lunches, but redesign coming
Associate Education Minister David Seymour says the government will feed the same number of school students and extend the scheme to 10,000 preschoolers
- while spending $107 million less than the Labour Government - by ordering items in bulk.
After months of speculation, Seymour has promised $478 million of funding for the school lunches programme, and confirmed it will continue in its current form
- with dozens of schools cooking meals in house - for the rest of the year.
For 2025 and 2026, year 0 to six students will keep getting school lunches as they are now, while students from year seven to 13 will be fed under an alternative model. The scheme in its entirety will be redesigned in the meantime, with input from an advisory group.
“The alternate provision model will use the government’s significant buying power to save money on food, give schools more flexibility on what they provide, and significantly reduce wastage. It also means parents and students can choose to make their own lunch,” he said.
Schools will order food from a central source to store, prepare and distribute to
“Students will receive nutritious food that they want to eat. It will be made up of the sorts of food items thousands of mums and dads put into lunch boxes every day for their kids.”
Associate Education Minister David Seymour
students. He said this provides more flexibility to the school and allows intermediate and secondary school students more choice.
“Students will receive nutritious food that they want to eat. It will be made up of the sorts of food items thousands of mums and dads put into lunch boxes every day for their kids – forget quinoa, couscous, and hummus, it will be more like sandwiches and fruit,” he said.
The Ministry of Education will determine the details in 2024, using an expert advisory group of commercial and not-for-profit experts in procurement, logistics and contracting, child welfare and nutrition.
The expert group and the ministry will engage with representatives from affected schools, he said.
Seymour has long been a vocal critic of the free school lunches programme. It feeds about 235,000 students across 1000 primary and secondary schools - about 40% of all schools and 27% of all students.
He said the programme, set up by the Labour Government, does not formally require schools to provide an opt-out option for parents, can’t adjust for absences, and wasn’t set up for schools to measure or report on wasted or surplus food.