Latest news with #KaOraKaAko
Scoop
6 days ago
- Health
- Scoop
Experts Urge Fix As Government Expands Failing Lunch Scheme To Primary Schools
Underprivileged primary school children are about to suffer the same poor service as their intermediate and secondary school peers, with the Government's announcement today that primary schools are transitioning to the cut price, revised Ka Ora Ka Ako - Healthy School Lunches programme. The revised version of the school lunch programme, rolled out to secondary and full primary schools in January 2025, saw the Government partner with national consortium the School Lunch Collective to achieve drastic reductions in the programme cost. The new version of the programme is being plagued by a multitude of problems, including delivery of unsafe and unpalatable food, massive wastage of uneaten meals and packaging, and the nutritional quality of the lunches plummeting. Nutrition experts found the government-funded school lunches are failing nutrition standards. The new lunches now provide only about half the energy recommended for a school lunch. Despite all providers being contractually obliged to meet the Ministry of Education's Nutrition Standards, none of the 13 meals provided by School Lunch Collective that were examined by nutrition experts met them. This means the lunches are no longer healthy - despite the programme being named the Healthy School Lunches programme. This is hardly surprising, given the School Lunch Collective members, Libelle and Compass, were failing to consistently deliver good quality lunches under the previous funding model, when they were receiving nearly three times the funding per lunch. "It's not a cost saving if it's not delivering the nutrition our most disadvantaged children need to succeed at school. Under the previous model, schools could choose how they provided lunches to their tamariki, with many walking away from Compass and Libelle to either do it themselves or work with local community businesses. Tamariki got better food for less cost. Our growing teenagers are now getting less to eat and being told to be grateful for it", says Professor Lisa Te Morenga, Health Coalition co-chair and Massey University researcher. "This Government has prioritised productivity, but hungry, undernourished children cannot learn effectively nor be productive. More than a quarter of children in Aotearoa face poverty and food insecurity - this programme is designed to help those kids. These children are our future workforce; we need to invest in them", says Professor Te Morenga. "I'm extremely angry and disappointed this government continues to ignore our voices and our evidence of the success of locally provided lunches. Instead, they want to remove what's working to save a few dollars - at the expense of our tamariki. We need to be investing in our tamariki and their future, says Seletute Mila, Tumuaki/Principal of Arakura School. "The changes to Ka Ora, Ka Ako have set back the progress schools were making in helping New Zealand's disadvantaged children. The programme must be fixed now- by being appropriately valued for the potential it has to lift our most disadvantaged children out of poverty and to lead healthy, productive lives. This benefits us all. We are calling for this current mean and draconian model to be abandoned. Raise the funding and give communities the flexibility to provide the best nutritious food they can for their tamariki," says Professor Te Morenga. More information Reports from schools across Aotearoa reveal serious failures in the revised programme, including: Unsafe food: The NZ Food Safety Authority is investigating concerns, as reported by BusinessDesk. Lack of allergy-friendly meals: Students with allergies are left without safe options, as reported by BusinessDesk. Waste and inefficiency: Unappealing meals are going uneaten, and previous systems to redistribute food to students or charities are no longer happening. Excess rubbish: The new system generates more landfill waste than before. Poor nutrition: The lack of fruit likely means lower fibre intake. Lack of transparency: Schools and families don't know the actual nutritional value of meals. Halal concerns: No clear process ensures meals meet halal dietary needs. Late or missing deliveries: Many schools report meals not arriving on time. Repetitive and insufficient portions: Meals lack variety and are often too small. No direct communication: Schools can no longer work directly with suppliers. No student feedback: Tamariki have no way to voice concerns about their meals.
RNZ News
19-06-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Despite decades of cost cutting, governments spend more than ever. How can we make sense of this?
By Ian Lovering* of International relations academic Ian Lovering delves into some of the history and social structures at play behind decisions about the national budget. Photo: RNZ Analysis : Recent controversies over New Zealand's Ka Ora, Ka Ako school lunch programme have revolved around the apparent shortcomings of the food and its delivery. Stories of inedible meals , scalding packaging and general waste have dominated headlines. But the story is also a window into the wider debate about the politics of "fiscal responsibility" and austerity politics . As part of the mission to "cut waste" in government spending, ACT leader and Associate Education Minister David Seymour replaced the school-based scheme with a centralised programme run by a catering corporation. The result was said to have delivered "saving for taxpayers" of $130 million - in line with the government's overall drive for efficiency and cost cutting. While Finance Minister Nicola Willis dislikes the term "austerity", her May budget cut the government's operating allowance in half , to $1.3 billion. This came on top of Budget cuts last year of around $4 billion. Similar policy doctrines have been subscribed to by governments of all political persuasions for decades. As economic growth (and the tax revenue it brings) has been harder for OECD countries to achieve over the past 50 years, governments have looked to make savings. What is strange, though, is that despite decades of austerity policies reducing welfare and outsourcing public services to the most competitive corporate bidder, state spending has kept increasing. New Zealand's public expense as a percentage of GDP increased from 25.9 percent in 1972 to 35.9 percent in 2022. And this wasn't unusual. The OECD as a whole saw an increase from 18.9 percent in 1972 to 29.9 percent in 2022. How can we make sense of so-called austerity when, despite decades of cost cutting, governments spend more than ever? In a recent paper , I argued that the politics of austerity is not only about how much governments spend. It is also about who gets to decide how public money is used. Austerity sounds like it is about spending less, finding efficiencies or living within your means. But ever rising budgets mean it is about more than that. In particular, austerity is shaped by a centralising system that locks in corporate and bureaucratic control over public expenditure, while locking out people and communities affected by spending decisions. In other words, austerity is about democracy as much as economics. We typically turn to the ideology of neoliberalism - democracy as much as economics. We typically turn to the ideology of neoliberalism - "Rogernomics" being the New Zealand variant - to explain the history of this. The familiar story is of a revolutionary clique taking over a bloated postwar state, reorienting it towards the global market, and making it run more like a business. Depending on your political persuasion, the contradiction of austerity's growing cost reflects either the short-sightedness of market utopianism or the stubbornness of the public sector to reform. But while the 1980s neoliberal revolution was important, the roots of austerity's managerial dimension go back further. And it was shaped less by a concern that spending was too high, and more by a desire to centralise control over a growing budget. Godfather of 'rational' budgeting: US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara (right), with US president Lyndon B Johnson (centre), in a Cabinet meeting, in 1968. Photo: Yoichi Okamoto - Public Domain Many of the managerial techniques that have arrived in the public sector over the austerity years - such as results-based pay, corporate contracting, performance management or evaluation culture - have their origins in a budgetary revolution that took place in the 1960s at the US Department of Defence. In the early 1960s, Defence Secretary Robert McNamara was frustrated with being nominally in charge of budgeting but having to mediate between the seemingly arbitrary demands of military leaders for more tanks, submarines or missiles. In response, he called on the RAND Corporation, a US think tank and consultancy, to remake the Defence Department's budgetary process to give the secretary greater capacity to plan. The outcome was called the Planning Programming Budgeting System . Its goal was to create a "rational" budget where policy objectives were clearly specified in quantified terms, the possible means to achieve them were fully costed, and performance indicators measuring progress were able to be reviewed. This approach might have made sense for strategic military purposes. But what happens when you apply the same logic to planning public spending in healthcare, education, housing - or school lunches? The past 50 years have largely been a process of finding out. What began as a set of techniques to help McNamara get control of military spending gradually diffused into social policy . These ideas travelled from the US and came to be known as the " New Public Management " framework that transformed state sectors all over the world. Dramatic moments of spending cuts - such as the 1991 " Mother of all Budgets " in New Zealand or Elon Musk's recent DOGE crusade in the US - stand out as major exercises in austerity. And fiscal responsibility is a firmly held conviction within mainstream political thinking. Nevertheless, government spending has become a major component of OECD economies. If we are to make sense of austerity in this world of permanent mass expenditure, we need a broader idea of what public spending is about. Budgets are classically thought to do three things. For economists, they are a tool of macroeconomic stabilisation: if growth goes down, "automatic stabilisers" inject public money into the economy to pick it back up. For social reformers, the budget is a means of progressively redistributing resources through tax and welfare systems. For accountants, the budget is a means of cost accountability: it holds a record of public spending and signals a society's future commitments. But budgeting as described here also fulfils a fourth function - managerial planning. Decades of reform have made a significant portion of the state budget a managerial instrument for the pursuit of policy objectives. From this perspective, underlying common austerity rhetoric about eliminating waste, or achieving value for money, is a deeper political struggle over who decides how that public money is used. To return to New Zealand's school lunch programme, any savings achieved should not distract from the more significant democratic question of who should plan school lunches - and public spending more broadly. Should it be the chief executives of corporatised public organisations and outsourced conglomerates managing to KPIs on nutritional values and price per meal, serving the directives of government ministers? Or should it be those cooking, serving and eating the lunches? * Ian Lovering is a lecturer in international relations, at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. This story was originally published on The Conversation .
RNZ News
22-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Budget 2025: 'Underperforming' areas cut to pay for 'seismic shift' in education
Education Minister Erica Stanford. Photo: Samuel Rillstone / RNZ The 2025 Budget puts the handbrake on annual growth in education spending, as past splurges on school buildings run out in the next few years. Despite that, spending on teaching and learning continues to grow with what the government describes as a "seismic shift" in support for children with disabilities. Education Minister Erica Stanford said new education initiatives in the Budget totalled $2.5 billion over four years, though about $614m of that total was reprioritised from "underperforming" initiatives. The government's total spend on early childhood and school education would grow by roughly $400m to $19.85b in 2025-26, but drop to $19b and $18.9b in subsequent years. The future decline was partly due to the fact the $240m a year free school lunch programme, Ka Ora, Ka Ako, was only funded until the end of 2026, and to a $600m drop in capital funding by 2027-28 and beyond. The Budget revealed education's worst-kept secret - the axing of the major school-clustering scheme, Kahui Ako, to help bankroll a $720m increase for learning support. The increase included $266m to extend the early intervention service from early childhood through to the end of Year 1 of primary school, including employing 560 more early intervention teachers and specialists and helping an additional 4000 children. It also included $192m over three years to provide learning support coordinators in 1250 more primary schools, $122m to meet increased demand for the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme for students with the highest needs, and $90m to build 25 new satellite classrooms for specialist schools. Stanford said the government was building up to adding 2 million extra teacher aide hours by 2028. The other big education initiative in the Budget was $298m for curriculum, nearly half of it targeted to maths and literacy, and about $76m for a new standardised reading, writing and maths test for schools. Other areas of spending included $672m for property, $150m for the teaching workforce, $104m for Māori education, and $140m for attendance, which was announced prior to the Budget . School operations grants received a 1.5 percent boost at a cost of $79m per full year, or $121.7m over the four years. The Budget total included $3b a year for early childhood education, with a 0.5 percent increase to early childhood service subsidies. The Budget included an 11 percent increase to government subsidies for private schools, raising the annual spend by $4.6m to 46.2m a year. Associate Education Minister David Seymour said the annual spend on private schools had not changed since 2010, when they had about 27,600 pupils - and they now had more than 33,000. The annual spend on charter schools also doubles next year to $57m, most of it for those operating as secondary schools, with the increase largely due to the drawdown of funding for setting up the schools. The Budget showed the government expected to sign contracts for 30 to 50 charter schools in the next 12 months. [subhead] The cuts The Budget included a myriad of cuts to redirect funding to other education initiatives. "We have assessed underspends and reprioritised initiatives that are underperforming or lack clear evidence that they're delivering intended outcomes," Stanford said. The biggest cut was ending the Kahui Ako scheme, which paid about 4000 teachers extra to lead improvements in groups of schools, resulting in a reprioritisation of $375m over four years . The Budget repurposed spending of $72m over four years on programmes for kura kaupapa and Māori-medium education. However, half of it came from a contingency fund that was superseded by another source of money, meaning the sector was not suffering a cut from that part of the change. It also reprioritised $50m from schools' regional response fund, about $40m from resource teachers of literacy, and $14m from resource teachers of learning and behaviour in secondary schools. Also repurposed was about $37m from underspent funding on primary schools and $12m from the Positive Behaviour for Learning scheme for schools. A new $24m per year spend on support for the maths curriculum was bankrolled from a $28m a year spend on teacher professional development. Also cut was $2.6m a year for the Reading Together programme, $1.6m a year for study support centres and about $4m from the greater Christchurch renewal programme. A further $2m a year was saved by cutting a classroom set-up and vandalism grant for schools. The Budget said the net five-year impact of the funding cuts and increases was $1.69b. Last year's Budget reprioritised $429m over four years. Associate Education Minister David Seymour. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone [subhead] Tertiary funding rises The Budget boosted the government's subsidies for enrolments in tertiary courses next year by 3 percent - but only in some subject areas such as science, teacher education and health - at a total cost of $213m over four years. Enrolments in science, technology, engineering and maths (the STEM subjects) at degree-level and above would attract a further 1.5 percent, increase at a cost of $64m. The Budget also included $111m over four years to cover expected enrolment growth in 2025 and 2026. The government said it also proposed allowing tertiary institutes to raise the fees they charged domestic students by up to 6 percent next year "to further help providers manage cost pressures and maintain quality delivery". Vocational Education Minister Penny Simmonds said there would also be funding for two years starting next year to help polytechnics transition to independence from mega-institute Te Pukenga. The figure was not specified. There would also be $30m a year for the new Industry Skills Boards, which would replace Workforce Development Councils, plus one-off funding of $10m to help with establishment costs. Overall tertiary spending would total $3.8b next year. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
29-04-2025
- General
- RNZ News
School breakfasts: 'A really great way to show our community that we care'
Emaa Shelford, Kiritahi Koroheke and Paul Marchioni are preparing the school lunches for the day. Photo: Ke-Xin Li It's 8:30 in the morning and a crowd of students at Melville Primary School are at the breakfast table in the hall. On this Monday it's scrambled eggs on wholemeal toast, with sausages left over from Friday's lunch. With their best vocabulary, the kids describe to me how their food tastes. "Amazing" and "phenomenal" are the terms they felt appropriate. Principal Bronwyn Haitana said breakfast makes a big difference, especially with attendance. "We used to have a lot of people away on Mondays and now Monday is probably our biggest breakfast club and it's just a really fun and happy place to be in the mornings." For the usual breakfast club, Melville Primary receives milk and Weet-Bix through Kickstart - a program co-funded by the Ministry of Social Development, Fonterra and Sanitarium. Last year MSD chipped in nearly $1.3 million for the scheme. The funding for 2023-24 was $1.266 million. Moko and Azaan say breakfast is a time they can spend with their friends. Photo: Ke-Xin Li Melville Primary also has fruit break - which is provided by Te Whatu Ora's Fruit In Schools programme. Te Whatu Ora spent $9,188,644 excluding GST on the Fruit in Schools programme over the 2023/24 financial year. Charitable organisation KidsCan also supplies cans like baked beans. "We sort of mix up from that Fruit in Schools, Breakfast Club, and Kidscan to make up the breakfast. When we have bread leftover from sandwiches the week before, we use that leftover bread for breakfast. We don't have very much wastage at all because we're always making sure that we have better ways of making that stuff used in other ways." Bronwyn Haitana considers her school lucky to be an internal model provider for the Ka Ora Ka Ako programme, which means her 250 pupils not only enjoy hot lunches cooked fresh at the school, but there's also a hot breakfast available at least once a week. In the kitchen is chef Paul Marchioni and his team. Marchioni learnt his skills by helping on the marae and knows how to make a crowd favorite. Emaa Shelford, Paul Marchioni and Kiritahi Koroheke are responsible for cooking for the 250 kids at Melville Primary School every day. Photo: Ke-Xin Li He spends the school holidays refining recipes. "I like to use our moko (grandchild) and whanau to have a try. It's funny as they're really honest, they'll just say, 'that was yuck'. They can provide some good intelligence. Unfortunately for quite a lot of our children, their parents actually can't afford to spend a lot of money on food. So they're cutting back on things like fresh vegetables. Some of the kids didn't even know what they were actually looking at in the lunch boxes that we provide. We have to hide those things that they're not used to eating. So blending and pureeing vegetables and putting it into the main meal, so they don't know it's there." At midday, the children are having pears for their fruit break. "It gives you more energy and you can be healthy," one student told me, and turned to ask his classmates what the fruit was. Arnia and Teiaea are on fruit duty. Photo: Ke-Xin Li Haitana said they use meals as an opportunity to educate the children about healthy food. "When they first started, they weren't used to eating the sandwiches and they were pulling out all the tomatoes and lettuce, and that was actually quite expensive. So we talked to the kids around seasonal foods and talked to them about why we have lots of tomatoes around this time. Now when we don't have tomatoes, they'll ask if tomatoes are not in season, and I'll say, yeah, it's too expensive at the moment. I think that's been really valuable because, before they sort of saw food as something that they just eat but not actually understand." Melville Primary School principal Bronwyn Haitana is in charge of handing out the lunches. Photo: Ke-Xin Li Some children were eager to share what they know about the meals they are having. "To keep our bodies healthy and to make our brains go 'wow'" and "to have energy to do mahi" are some of the answers. The school lunch break is at 1:20pm. While handing out the lunches, Haitana also checks the lunches that children brought from home and swaps out the unhealthy ones for a school-made lunch. This day, she swapped out one student's jam biscuits for chicken rice. Principal Bronwyn Haitana swaps a box of jam biscuits for chicken rice. Photo: Ke-Xin Li Haitana said while the internal model is a lot of work, she wouldn't give it up for anything. "I think I've also changed my attitude from food being just to feed the kids, more to it actually is a part of our school culture. We're an urban community. We do have a lot of people, who I would call displaced, such as people who not necessarily whakapapa back to the Hamilton area. We have a lot of Kainga Ora homes, which is great because it means they're out of emergency housing, but it just means that there are a lot of people who might not have whanau support around them. It's (food) a really great way to show our community that we care about them and their kids." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
