‘We need to ask — do we need school-provided meals in Australia?’: Have your say in poll

A national debate is looming over whether schools should provide all students’ lunches, with research showing it would likely be a hit with parents. Have your say.

“We need to ask – do we need school-provided meals in Australia?”

Parents want schools to supply their kids’ lunches for convenience and food security reasons, and are potentially willing to pay for the privilege, new research has revealed.

A survey by Flinders University shows 86 per cent of Aussie parents polled backed the introduction of school-provided quality lunches.

The survey of parents with children aged between four and 17 showed huge support for an overhaul of the Australian school lunch box system, Flinders University dietitian and PhD candidate Alexandra Manson said.

Ms Manson will present her findings at the Dietitians Australia Conference in August.

While just 71 parents took part in the preliminary survey, the results showed the vast majority were keen for schools to take over the responsibility of supplying kids lunches, she said.

Convenience, social and environmental benefits and food security were given as the main reasons for their support.

Research shows a healthy, school-provided lunch can improve student outcomes.

Research shows healthy school-provided meals can improve attendance, classroom attention, cognition, academic performance, social skills, nutrition and the health of children, while also addressing food insecurity issues in students’ homes.

Currently parents spend an average of $4 a day making their children’s school lunches.

Researcher Dr Brittany Johnson said the existing Australian school food system increasingly relied on families and charities to provide lunches to children at the most important stages of their educational and physical development.

“Families have described how challenging the provision of healthy, enjoyable and affordable lunch boxes can be, so we need to start thinking about how what we can do to better support families. It’s the right time to start a national conversation about embracing school-provided meals,” she said.

“Embracing school-provided meals requires transformation of the existing Australian system, to create an equitable system which achieves benefits for children and families. Our preliminary data demonstrates an emerging parental interest in adopting such a system.

“We need to ask – do we need school-provided meals in Australia and what could this look like in an Australian context?”

WHY YOU SHOULD TELL YOUR KIDS ABOUT YOUR MEMORIES

Kids who had parents recall their favourite memories aloud to them as babies are more likely to have better mental health and communication skills, researchers say.

Studies emerging across Australia and overseas have revealed that sharing experiences with young children as they grow up has positive long term impacts on a child’s ability to articulate emotions.

One study – which tracked a large sample of babies from birth and again at the age of 21 – found that adults who had parents talk about their memories from their own lives had improved emotional health compared to those who did not.

Researchers at Macquarie University found that children whose mothers included dialogue with open questions that included ‘when’ and ‘what’ made more “high-elaborative utterances and emotion references”.

Deakin University’s Associate Professor Louise Paatsch said the practice boosted language development, which had benefits across academic performance and social skills.

“It supports children’s opportunities to develop more complex and elaborate language use because personal stories represent emotions, which are a major contributor towards understanding emotive language that then leads to expressing themselves,” Prof Paatsch said.

“It supports their language and cognitive development, and in particular, their own storytelling.

“The more that parents and caregivers can provide conversations with their children using open ended questions that follow the child’s interests, the greater the outcome for language, cognition, and literacy, which then leads into social and emotional wellbeing.”

Those findings mirror an international trend, with a world-first New Zealand Study monitoring the impacts of memory sharing from birth up until the children involved in the study turned 21 years old.

Jacinta Covalea with her baby Christian 9 and a half months. Picture: Ian Currie

That study revealed that 115 now 21-year-olds were able to communicate better if their mothers used an ‘elaborate reminiscing’ technique two decades earlier.

It comes after the most recent Australian Early Development Census (AEDC), a national assessment that tracks how children develop by the time they start school, found that kids’ communication skills had not improved overall since 2015.

There was also a small decrease in emotional maturity, with the number of children considered developmentally vulnerable up from 8.4 per cent in 2018 to 8.5 per cent in 2021.

Playgroup Victoria chief executive Danny Schwarz said most mothers involved with groups co-ordinated by the organisation already practised the technique with their babies because it equipped kids to maintain relationships they develop in their early years.

He said it was also crucial to help break down cultural barriers that may prevent open dialogue from flowing between parents and their babies.

“It’s not because parents necessarily don’t want to communicate with their children. In some cultures that actually it’s not part of a mix,” he said.

“But when children are exposed to language, either orally, or when they’re being read to, there’s really significant differences in their development over time.”

Blackburn North mother Jacinta Covalea said she reminisces about her late grandfather with her nine-month-old son, Christian.

“I have a photo of him and every morning, we talk to him and I always talk about him,” she said.

Originally published as ‘We need to ask — do we need school-provided meals in Australia?’: Have your say in poll