The Audit Office has responded to an Official Information Act request regarding the changes to the Healthy School Lunches programme.
The changes were proposed in 2024 by Associate Minister for Education David Seymour, and rolled out over 2025.
The original Healthy School Lunches programme was expected to cost between $5.78 and $8.62 a lunch in 2025. The Alternative Provision Model, proposed in the 2024 budget, aimed to reduce this to $3 per lunch, not including the cost of distribution or delivery.
The Audit Office found that because the Alternative Provision Model was proposed for the 2025 school year, negotiations had to take place before the May 2024 budget.
The Ministry of Education was aware of past performance issues that the new suppliers had displayed in the past. Risks to do with quality and production capacity infamously manifested early on in 2025, and the Audit Office found that the Ministry did not create adequate contingency plans to account for these known issues.
The Alternative Provision model for school lunches also created issues for schools. To reduce costs, the programme moved towards shelf-stable lunches that schools would have to store. Less than 20% of schools could actually store more than a week’s worth of shelf-stable food, and 50% of schools did not have the facilities to prepare the lunches. The new model required more staff that schools did not have the funding to hire, and the shelf-stable foods also created an increased amount of packaging waste that schools had to manage.
The $3 per lunch budget created issues for suppliers as well. For some existing suppliers, this was not feasible, meaning existing suppliers had to withdraw. Some felt that their contracts had ended without due notice. For other suppliers, the nutritional content of the lunches was reduced in order to keep costs down. For schools, students, and parents, the decrease in nutrition was a concern. The decrease in nutrition and quality led to less students eating school lunches and more food being wasted.
The office of the Associate Minister for Education told the Audit Office that “in its view, under the former programme the Ministry did not have enough data on waste and surplus, that schools had distributed surplus meals to communities, and that schools had used accumulated funds for other “unrelated” purposes.”
In response to the less-than-favourable report, Associate Minister for Education David Seymour said that “the Audit Office favoured process over outcomes” and that “by making the programme more efficient I have saved the taxpayer $360m and counting”.
In reference to the poor quality and nutrition of the school lunches, Seymour called these “teething issues” that were addressed. The report acknowledged that “monitoring arrangements seem to have improved over time”.
Between the office of the Auditor-General and that of Seymour, there seems to be disagreement as to what the main issue at hand is. Seymour seems to think the financial savings outweigh the cost, while the Audit Office is more concerned with how the children needing school lunches were affected.
