While many of New Zealand’s schools are disillusioned with the government’s nationwide Healthy School Lunches programme, a Hauraki school is showing it’s still possible to provide tasty, healthy meals to students.
Paeroa College’s school lunches are prepared on site, from fresh, locally-supplied ingredients.
Each day kitchen supervisor Jan Mitchell and her team make up to 360 meals from scratch in the school’s commercial kitchen. Their menu is varied – featuring crowd favourites such as spaghetti bolognaise, fresh subway sandwiches, and nachos – and each meal is stuffed with vegetables. The main courses are supplemented with fresh fruit, nuts, and muesli bars at morning tea.
The trio were proud of the meals they provided, Jan said.
“The kids are loving it. And the feedback from some of the students I’ve been getting: ‘that’s actually nicer than my mum’s, but don’t tell her’,” Jan said.
“It’s all about the kids, and it’s good to be feeding them.”
School lunches are nothing new at Paeroa College. But the overhaul of the government’s school lunch programme, which took effect at the beginning of 2025, came with several changes.
The Ka Ora, Ka Ako or Healthy School Lunches programme is the initiative which provides meals to 242,000 disadvantaged students nationwide. Most schools in the programme operate under the external model, with lunches delivered daily by the School Lunch Collective. Some schools, such as Paeroa College, operate under the internal model, preparing their meals onsite. There is also an option under the legislation for an iwi and hapū partnership model.
However, schools on the external model are not permitted to switch to another model without Ministry of Education approval.
The mandated budget for external model schools is $3 per meal. Internal model schools are allocated $4 per meal, to account for the additional costs of administration, staffing, and waste.
The new internal allowance is roughly half what it was in the past, Jan said, but even so her team is coming in well under budget.
Outside the college however, many other schools aren’t so happy with the new programme.
Turua School, which runs on the external model, was one of several schools nationwide whose meals turned up late in the initial weeks of the programme – once having to resort to sandwiches made by staff to keep the kids fed.
Principal Karen Houghton said the meals were now arriving on time, but while she appreciated that lunches were available for her students, their quality left something to be desired.
“They’re not as good as what they had before,” she said.
“The children don’t seem to enjoy it that much, so we have a lot of leftovers. I do think that it would be great to have a local supplier and put that money back into the local economy.”
Another school principal told The Profile they could “write an essay” about their complaints but they were unable to comment publicly about the issue.
A parliamentary petition has also been circulating to cancel the School Lunch Collective’s contract. The petition, started by Māori lawyer Tania Waikato on March 12, is urging the government to return the lunch contracts to local providers. As at March 31, it had 7978 signatures. The Collective has been mired with complaints since it took over the external providers contract, with images of frozen or overheated, mass-produced and unappetising meals circulating in the national media.
But Paeroa College principal Andrew Cameron said their programme was an example of school lunches done right.
“We’re showing that we have a sustainable model, and I think if we can show that with a school our size, then other schools can do it similarly,” he said.
“[The external model] is where all the headaches are at the moment, everything you’re reading and hearing.
“And ultimately, the only reason [we’re] a success is because we’ve got three awesome people in there working hard for our kids.
“We want to pump Jan’s tyres up because there’s so much bad publicity around school lunches, the centralised model, and we could not be happier with the situation we’re in.”
