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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Budget documents show the government was told of “profound” wellbeing benefits from the free school lunch scheme months before it decided to trim its funding.
The research was supposed to be published in June but was still under wraps.
However, Budget papers published this week referred to the study’s early findings.
“Emerging findings support previous evaluation findings, but also highlight further benefits of the programme, including improvements in achievement and the importance of universality,” said a December briefing note to Minister of Education Erica Stanford.
“This includes that learners are more settled and able to engage with classroom activity and learning, with some schools showing increased academic achievement resulting from an enhanced learning experience from being more settled and less distracted. Initial findings also indicate that the programme is having a profound impact on the wellbeing of learners,” it said.
Earlier this year, the government cut annual funding for the scheme by $107 million, reducing the per-student spend for children at intermediate and secondary schools to $3.
A March briefing paper about changing the model for Ka Ora, Ka Ako said it was not clear whether lunches could be provided at that price.
“The most significant risk from the proposal is that we have not market-tested or otherwise analysed the proposed $3 per head price. We do not know whether sufficient supply exists to offer lunches to the specified standard at this price across the full range of schools,” the document said.
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TL;DR this government that is so focused on educational achievement, was given evidence that providing school lunches lifted achievement. So they decided to cut funding to school lunches.
After public pushback, they said they would keep school lunches but cut funding to a level that schools probably can’t actually provide lunches at.
Oh funny - I just posted Max Rashbrooke’s article on the impact of changes from The Spinoff and that’s my take too - school lunches = achievement, we are worried about achievement, so let’s cut lunches. Seymour is actually cartoonishly evil at times.
I really hope they don’t cut the Counselling in Schools programme.
A scheme that provides counselling in more than 200 primary schools makes distressed children feel better, improves behaviour, and raises attendance.
An Education Review Office (ERO) report - published today - provides evidence that Counselling in Schools, a $44-million scheme introduced in 2021, worked well.
Teachers told review officers the scheme reduced disciplinary problems and children who received counselling were less likely to “punch first, talk later”.
Encouragingly, eight in 10 students report improved psychological health after receiving counselling, and students with the most psychological distress have the largest improvement. Of the 71 percent of students who entered counselling reaching the clinical cut-off for distress, almost half no longer reach the cut-off for psychological distress at the end of counselling. This is a very positive outcome."
This seems to be one of the most effective mental health initiatives of recent times and hits a number of National’s supposed priorities. Unfortunately though I don’t have much faith that they’ll keep investing in it.
That’s an amazing programme, would be nice to see it rolled out to more schools but I guess that’s not going to happen with this government. Do high schools have any support along these lines?
Good question, I have no idea.
To be honest I only stumbled across this news article a few days back and hadn’t heard anything about the trial until then. Seems like a success story that needs to be broadcast loudly and widely to make sure it continues.
As usual, the feelings of politicians trump evidence.
NAFf feel that tax cuts are more important than the kids, so we get tax cuts.
Well, we also get a complete rewrite of the curriculum and a forced 3 hours of reading, writing, maths a day (out of approx 4.5-5 hours of school time each day once you take out morning tea and lunch) because this government is so worried about educational achievement. But it’s again that idea of looking like they are doing something. Rewriting the curriculum and setting forced time for the 3 R’s is something they can stand up and say “look, we’re doing stuff” where as school lunches were already in place so there was nothing for them to show to their voters.
Remember that the stats they’re using to argue achievement is going real bad don’t actually say that. They show lower achievement but the academics who look at the study & whatnot advise that that’s because the methodology changed, not that achievement actually went down in real terms.
Haha yes, it reminds me of the show “are you smarter than a 7 (?) year old?” where they ask these random questions about ancient egypt or whatever and the adults get them wrong and the kids get them right because the kids just spent a term being taught the exact material.
Then imagine if you gave the kids a test on Ancient Rome when they had only studied Ancient Egypt, then said how much worse the results are getting.
I know you’d expect something like maths to be more generic and not change like my example, but different experiences of mine come to mind. I remember getting marked wrong for maths questions on estimation not because I didn’t estimate well but because I wasn’t using the method that they were teaching. I also remember working my way through Khan Acadamy and struggling with easy stuff (as an adult) because I was taught different terminology for things.
Yup, and then if I look back on when I learnt maths in primary school, 39-31 years ago. We wrote learnt a bunch of maths, but the bulk of it was dumb calculation that beyond a certain amount is just easier to whack into a calculator these days. Its like people have forgotten that sure, in the 80s we didn’t have a calculator at hand all of the time, so being able to do it in your head was really beneficial. Nowadays everyone carries a powerful computer in their pocket and going beyond 3 digit equations its mostly better to get it right first time with the tool than risk getting it wrong in your head.
The same holds true with your Ancient Egypt - Ancient Rome analogy; what’s important is not knowing facts about those two long dead civilisations, but knowing how to evaluate the various facts you might find with that pocket computer of yours and establish which is more likely to be reliable etc.
@Dave John Gerritson’s discussion on Morning Report this morning was pretty good. This looks like the outcome will be the worst of all possibilities. Not enough children get fed to make a difference in anything, cost cutting means the lunches that are available aren’t good quality, and the whole thing is a failure. Sadly, that would provide the ‘evidence’ the government needs to cut the programme entirely.
Its the same as the UK austerity playbook that as wrecked the NHS.
