Hon David Seymour
Associate Minister of Education

Associate Education Minister David Seymour has today visited Otahuhu College where the new school lunch programme has served up healthy lunches to students in the first days of the school year.

“As schools open in 2025, the programme will deliver nutritious meals to around 242,000 students, every school day. On today’s menu from the School Lunch Collective is beef pasta bolognaise in classic tomato sauce,” says Mr Seymour.

“Last year the programme was reformed to deliver the same outcomes while costing taxpayers less. This was achieved by embracing commercial expertise, using government buying power, and generating supply chain efficiencies to realise over $130m of annual cost savings, even more than anticipated in Budget 2024.

“Every student who previously received a school lunch will continue to do so. By leveraging private sector expertise from companies like Compass Group, Libelle, Gilmours, and over 17 food manufacturers and suppliers, we are setting a precedent for the government working with businesses to achieve better results.

“I’m pleased to see that the new programme is underway. Since announcing the programme in October last year, the focus has been to support student learning by providing a free nutritious meal to students, every school day.

“If the previous government had set up the programme with the new, more efficient, model, around $800 million of taxpayer’s funds could have been saved over the past five years with the same outcome for the students. It was impossible to justify keeping the old model when it is possible to deliver at half the cost.

“The government is also providing food for up to 10,000 two-to-five-year-olds who attend low-equity, community-based early learning services. This will be funded by some of the cost savings found in the lunch programme. From 31 March around 4,000 children will receive meals in early learning centres. Additional centres will join the programme every 6 weeks until we reach 10,000 children receiving nutritious food. 

“I expect the programme will continue to evolve over time. But first and foremost we’re proud to deliver the new programme to schools for the start term 1 2025.”

© Scoop Media