Roman Travers: Hungry kids falling behind at school - maybe we need to stop blaming our curriculum

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

Although the school holidays are still in full swing, that doesn’t mean that the country’s children are getting the food they need at home.

New Zealand children are still going hungry at school and that means that they’re ending up years behind other children in key subjects. The data that shows this ongoing issue for us all and also ranks New Zealand poorly for food poverty.

The health researchers behind the just-published analysis argue the government needs to double the number of children served by its newly revamped lunches in schools scheme.

It’s no surprise that hungry students struggle to learn: food poverty has been cited as a big barrier in New Zealand’s scoring under the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment.

A comparison between that and two other global datasets has allowed a team of researchers to look at the link in greater depth.

After analysing food insecurity levels with subject-specific scores, the team revealed a stark trend.

Any degree of food insecurity was associated with much lower academic performance - a pattern that held across all subjects, age groups, and surveys.

Professor Boyd Swinburn from Auckland University is a co-author of the study I’m referring to, and he says he didn’t expect the effect size to be so large.

In all, it equated to a learning gap equivalent to hungry students trailing two to four years behind in subjects like maths and reading by age 15 – even after adjusting for socio-economic indicators.

Something else born from this study is that there’s also a gradient effect. The more severe the food insecurity, the greater the gap in scores compared to kids with no food insecurity.

The problem doesn’t just reflect hungry children finding it harder to concentrate in class, but other factors including parents keeping their kids home rather than face stigma at school.

It’s all very well blaming the state of the New Zealand curriculum, or the size of the classrooms confronting our teachers, but when you may well address some of the demonstrably poor outcomes shown in this study – by simply ensuring that our children are well fed and literally well catered for at school, what on earth are we waiting for?

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