The ministry told RNZ it fielded 259 queries and complaints in the first two weeks of the school year. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Nearly a third of schools receiving free lunches from the School Lunch Collective have contacted the Ministry of Education with queries and complaints.
The ministry told RNZ it fielded 259 queries and complaints in the first two weeks of the school year, from 141 of the 466 schools the collective covered.
"This includes simple requests for information as well as feedback, both positive and negative, regarding delivery timeframes and meal quality. Queries have come from across New Zealand, with the majority from Auckland schools facing the most delays in the first two weeks of term one," it said.
The ministry said the queries included 156 about delivery, 39 about special diet meals, six about the temperature of the meals and seven providing negative feedback about the taste of the meals.
The ministry said its service agreement with Compass Group, which was the lead for the School Lunch Collective, had stringent performance targets and contractual requirements.
However, it did not say if the group was meeting those targets and requirements, despite RNZ asking.
The School Lunch Collective last year won the contract for providing meals to secondary, intermediate and primary schools with pupils in Years 7-8 that qualified for the free lunch programme.
It told RNZ it delivered meals on time to 97 percent of schools this week. It also said had it had hired more drivers, brought in more trucks, boosted production capacity to ensure sufficient meals were prepared well in advance and added more staff to oversee special dietary needs.
It said it would not discuss whether it was meeting the terms of its contract with the Ministry of Education.
Kaitao Intermediate principal Phil Palfrey said the new lunches were not as good as the system his Rotorua school of 260 pupils previously had. He said food was very late twice in the first week of school, and there were ongoing difficulties with children refusing to eat the food and using staff time to distribute it.
Palfrey said one of the biggest challenges was simply opening the containers of hot food.
Associate Education Minister David Seymour eating a school lunch. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
"It's really hard to get the plastic wrap off. You actually have to use scissors or something like that to get it off. If you actually got one and I said to you 'well open it' you'd say 'I can't'."
The collective's website featured a video showing how to pierce and remove the plastic covering from the meal trays using the forks that accompanied the meals.
Palfrey said more children refused to eat the food than previously, and that undermined the sense of community created by the previous system.
"What I've been very keen on right from the very start was that the lunches get distributed, hot and piping, and the kids have karakia, sit down together and communicate and have a really nice 10 minutes before they go out to lunch - and that same sense of community doesn't seem to be there right now because so many kids are not eating it.
"It just doesn't work the same as it did before. Before, there might have been one or two kids who didn't eat it but now it's too many and it's lost its way. I'm pretty unhappy.
"We had a great system before... it was just great and now we've got this."
Vaughan Couillault from Papatoetoe High School said initial delivery problems at his school had not recurred. He said he was eating the food so he knew what was going on, and said many of the complaints about it were caused by its appearance.
"It's mostly about the size of the packaging and it needing to be smaller which squishes everything in," he said.
"The re-thermalising of the mac'n'cheese is proving problematic because it looks quite odd, but tastes okay. There's a range of meals on offer and not every one is going to be your favourite every day, but our's are getting consumed, it's fine."
Couillault said favourite meals among students appeared to include meatballs and butter chicken, while a recent vegetable lasagna had not proved popular.
Andrew King from the Rural School Leaders Association said its members had noticed an improvement in deliveries.
"What I'm hearing is that it definitely has improved. The issue was there were lunches arriving way too early and way too late or not at all. There are still a few cases of 'not at all' every now and then but there's definitely a reduction in issues around lateness and being too early."
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