New school lunch program aims to replace the lunch box with freshly prepared meals.
Three Tassie schools wil take part in a trial of a new lunch program this term, with schools providing feshly prepared meals each day. Could it be the end of the cut lunch?
For gen-x kids like myself, school lunch times were always kind of frantic affairs.
We would grab our lunch boxes, sit down on benches outside and see how quickly we could bolt down enough food to keep the patrolling teacher from snarling at us to eat “one more sandwich”.
But, of course, all we wanted to do was go and play, and every minute we spent sitting down eating was one less minute of play time. So the moment the first kid finished, snapped their lunch box shut, and stood up, it was basically a signal to the rest of us to do the same.
Full stomach or not.
Now, while there is certainly a kind of romance attached to those memories of comparing lunches and swapping sandwiches outside in the playground before just running off to play, there is actually quite a bit of evidence to suggest that model is contributing to poor classroom behaviour (especially in the afternoons) and subsequently less impressive academic achievement.
If you’re hungry, you can’t focus, and if you can’t focus, you can’t learn as well.
Then there are the other issues like kids feeling self conscious about what they bring to eat at school, or the many families who simply cannot afford to send their kids to school with food at all – often not even breakfast.
According to Julie Dunbabin, executive officer of the Tasmanian School Canteen Association, the solution to all of this is reasonably straightforward and far from revolutionary: schools need to start providing meals for students, and making sure everyone has time to eat.
This is already the model in plenty of other countries, including the US, UK, Finland and Japan, where students sit down together to eat lunch, which is provided by the school.
Dunbabin says the benefits are quite clear and, with many Tasmanian schools already offering breakfast programs for students, she says the concept is already there.
“It shouldn’t be some revolutionary idea but it is different to what we’ve always done,” she says. “Everyone’s aim is to have healthy kids, though, and this is one way of doing that.”
Last year Dunbabin was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to travel to seven different countries to study the ways they feed children while at school.
She went to the UK, France, Finland, the US, Italy and Japan and, while each place had a slightly different method of providing meals for students, the common factors she found were improved academic performance and better behaviour as a result of being properly fed.
“In the places I visited, they ensure that every child is fed at school, and everyone sits down for 20 minutes at lunch time to eat,” she says.
“And the spin-off benefits are that the students are better able to concentrate in the afternoons, their academic outcomes improve, and by sourcing the food locally where possible, local producers also benefit.”
Many schools around Tasmania already run breakfast programs, to ensure all students start the day having eaten a good breakfast, catering to those who might not have food at home, through to those who simply left the house in too much of a rush to eat.
The result is, of course, fewer students suffering the effects of fatigue and other effects of hunger during the day, which is a benefit to staff and students alike.
So the proof of concept already exists. Dunbabin’s goal now is to try and expand that model to eventually provide lunch at every school as well.
During term four, the Tasmanian School Canteen Association has been granted funding to trial a new lunch program in three schools – Triabunna District School, Warrane Primary School, and Richmond Primary School – and provide lunch for students five days a week for four weeks.
Twenty other schools have already voiced an interest in signing up if there are further trials.
“The three schools are very enthusiastic,” Dunbabin says. “Triabunna already did day one of their trial on the last day of term three and we had great feedback from the children.
“They had spaghetti bolognaise with green salad and a fruit platter for dessert. It was a hit, and Tamara, their canteen manager, did a great job. We developed a two-week menu for what we think children would like to eat but with no party pies or chicken nuggets!”
In the Premier’s Economic and Social Recovery Advisory Council Interim Report of July 2020, recommendation 62 states: “The State Government should plan and transition from increased emergency food relief provision towards community-based and school-based food security models.”
The upcoming school lunch pilot program is being funded by a Healthy Tasmania grant through the Department of Health and will be evaluated by the Menzies Institute for Medical Research to see if the children enjoy the food, if parents value their children being fed well at school, and if teachers observe positive changes in behaviour, concentration and attendance.
The pilot will also help to determine the cost of providing these meals, and whether some sort of nominal cost will need to be passed on to parents.
“We’re not proposing that the government should pay for all of it,” Dunbabin says.
“I think enough parents out there would be keen to pay $3-$5 a day to have the school feed their children a proper cooked meal like this, as opposed to as much as $8 spent on often highly processed foods marketed for lunch boxes. And it would save parents time in packing a lunch box every day.”
Additionally, funding from the Department of Education through their Child and Student Wellbeing Strategy Unit will allow the creation of School Food Plans, working with six schools to determine when and how food is provided to children while at school from breakfast through to the end of the school day and links to the curriculum.
“It is about good food and the enjoyment of food. It will look at the pleasures of growing, cooking and eating food cooked from scratch,” she says.
“It will also look at the research that links happy children with nourishing food and academic outcomes.”
Tasmanian Principals Association president Sally Milbourne says she will be watching the trials with great interest.
“The literature is very clear that when kids are well nourished their social and academic outcomes are much stronger – we all get that afternoon slump,” she says.
“I like the notion of trialling it and seeing if it works. The research can say something but I think our practices need to be based on evidence and I will be keen to see the results of this.”
Of course, these changes would involve a significant cultural shift for Tasmanian schools, where we are used to taking packed lunches or buying food from the canteen or tuckshop.
But Dunbabin says with evidence of parents holding children back from going to school because they have no food to put in their lunch box, it might be time to embrace this shift.
“With the countries I visited, they generally started the model of feeding children meals at school as a consequence of World War II, when rationing was still happening in the aftermath and malnutrition was a problem,” she says.
“When Finland started their program just after war, most children hadn’t even gone to school in six years, so this was also a way to entice them back.
“Australia was impacted as well, but not to the same extent as Europe. So that model of feeding children in schools never took off here.
“Australia and New Zealand both have that canteen/tuckshop model where kids can go to the shop and essentially choose what they want.”
Dunbabin says that by providing students with sit-down meals every day, with a rotating and predictable, nutritionally balanced menu, it would smooth out a lot of equity issues, as well as ensuring children eat properly each day.
Picky eaters will have an enticement to try new foods because they see their friends doing it. Parents under financial strain will have one less meal to have to worry about. Comparing lunch box contents will be a thing of the past. And it will be a step in the right direction for addressing childhood obesity.
Dunbabin says our post-pandemic climate in Tasmania right now is the perfect time to consider making this shift.
“What we saw in that lockdown period was schools realising they had students and their families going hungry, so canteen staff were cooking ready-to-eat meals to send home to families,” she says.
“It showed that canteens had the capacity and the care to do this. And we also have this situation where some children have been homeschooling for months and might not want to go back to school, so this might be a way of enticing them back to the classroom.
“In one of the schools I visited on my Churchill Fellowship, all the students had a white card that they tapped on a sensor every time they went to have lunch. This was so the school could keep track of who had meals and at the end of each term some of those bills would go to the families, and others would go to the government depending on the income of the families.
“The children didn’t know about the cost, they just tapped on and ate lunch.”
Of course, in this country there is often some resistance to the idea of the government paying to feed children at school. But Dunbabin says it can be broken down to a simple equation of the government spending money as a preventive measure, or paying more later through the public health system in the form of increased rates of diabetes, heart disease and other effects of poor diet.
“Sure, some people will always say it’s not the government’s job and in an ideal world it wouldn’t be,” Dunbabin says. “But the reality is that children go hungry for a range of reasons, that’s just how it is, there’s no point assigning blame or fault.
“Teachers already make toasted sandwiches and other food options for children who turn up at school with no food. It’s just a reality.”
If the trials are a success, it could still take years to completely roll out this kind of new model across all schools in the state but Dunbabin is confident that we could do it.
With many child care and early learning centres already providing meals prepared on site for children each day, she says there should be no reason why we cannot simply continue that same routine right the way through school.
“Our existing canteen model could easily, over a few years, be transferred to this seated model with everyone eating the same thing, and a menu that changes daily instead of giving children 30 options to pick from each day,” she says.
“The economies of scale when cooking like this will keep costs low, as well as allowing us to tap into sources of local and seasonal produce.
“We already have some good things happening in schools in this area, we just need to keep that momentum.” ●
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