Early childhood centres in the government’s free lunch scheme say it is reaching children who live in poverty.
Despite initial revolts against vegetables, they say children are enjoying the meals and more centres should be included.
More than 8000 two to five-year-olds at more than 300 early childhood centres have been receiving food through the scheme this year.
They were included at a cost of $4 million a year when the government revised the free school lunch scheme to cut per-meal costs and save $130m a year.
The early childhood scheme pays charity KidsCan to send ingredients to participating centres, which then cook the meals including vegetable curry, ravioli, and tuna pasta salad.
Jo Edmonds, the owner of Manaaki Tamariki Early Learning Centre in Rotorua, said the scheme was a big improvement on the lunches parents had been providing.
“Their behaviour is different because they’ve got nutritious meals. With lunchboxes there’s a lot of packet stuff so we have found that there’s not a lot of sugar so behaviour has changed,” she said.
Edmonds said the children also had more conversations and interactions when they had lunch.
“We eat like a family, we brought that homely feeling into the centre with all the children sitting down and having a meal together.”
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Edmonds said families were noticing a difference too.
Children were eating food at home that they had previously refused and one parent with two children at the centre said it was saving her $70 a week.
“Also, we’re not having children not attending because they don’t have lunch. So attendance is higher,” she said.
Mel Jeffcoat – the operations leader at Kids Campus, a community-owned non-profit centre in Tauranga – said some of its families were struggling with poverty.
She said prior to joining the scheme, families were expected to supply food for their children, but some were unable to do so.
“We had about seven children that we were actually supplying food to because they weren’t having anything. We didn’t want food, kai as we refer to it, to be a barrier to them coming so we just supplied it,” she said.
Jeffcoat said in the past she probably would not have agreed that the government should feed children, but she supported the scheme and wanted it extended further.
“My view has changed because society’s changed and poverty is so real and I think that people don’t really understand, particularly if you’re not working with children or you’re not living in a community where that’s really evident,” she said.
Matt Dol, the owner of Little Parrots in Mount Maunganui, said children attending the centre used to bring lunch from home and initially some were not happy with the vegetables in the free lunches.
“At the beginning it was a little bit disheartening because we were having a lot of wasted food that was served and they weren’t touching. Now it’s amazing. There are great conversations going around the table about food, there’s great social interaction as well,” he said.
Mikayla Manston, the owner of Kai Kids Preschool in Kaitangata, said the centre used to provide lunch itself but now it could use that money to provide more resources for the children.
She said children had definite favourites such as a vegetarian version of butter chicken made with chickpeas.
KidsCan founder Julie Chapman said the scheme was reaching more than 8000 children, in addition to about 6000 KidsCan was already feeding.
She said the inclusion of profit-making centres in the scheme had attracted criticism, but their children deserved it as much as those at non-profit services.
“Even some of those that are privately-owned are barely washing their face in terms of being able to cover costs and resourcing and the children that go to those centres are living with this food insecurity,” she said.
Chapman said the programme cost about $2 per meal per child and there had been no food safety problems or complaints.
She said the scheme would soon be extended to more centres to bring the total number of children to 10,000.
Chapman said the ministry used its equity index, based on data about children’s socio-economic backgrounds, to identify centres that could be included.
She said KidsCan had identified about 60 more centres that needed its help and it would be interesting to see how many of those were tagged by the index.
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