Budget documents show the government was told of "profound" wellbeing benefits from the free school lunch scheme months before it decided to trim its funding.
The research was supposed to be published in June but was still under wraps.
However, Budget papers published this week referred to the study's early findings.
"Emerging findings support previous evaluation findings, but also highlight further benefits of the programme, including improvements in achievement and the importance of universality," said a December briefing note to Minister of Education Erica Stanford.
"This includes that learners are more settled and able to engage with classroom activity and learning, with some schools showing increased academic achievement resulting from an enhanced learning experience from being more settled and less distracted. Initial findings also indicate that the programme is having a profound impact on the wellbeing of learners," it said.
Earlier this year, the government cut annual funding for the scheme by $107 million, reducing the per-student spend for children at intermediate and secondary schools to $3.
A March briefing paper about changing the model for Ka Ora, Ka Ako said it was not clear whether lunches could be provided at that price.
"The most significant risk from the proposal is that we have not market-tested or otherwise analysed the proposed $3 per head price. We do not know whether sufficient supply exists to offer lunches to the specified standard at this price across the full range of schools," the document said.
As usual, the feelings of politicians trump evidence.
NAFf feel that tax cuts are more important than the kids, so we get tax cuts.
Well, we also get a complete rewrite of the curriculum and a forced 3 hours of reading, writing, maths a day (out of approx 4.5-5 hours of school time each day once you take out morning tea and lunch) because this government is so worried about educational achievement. But it's again that idea of looking like they are doing something. Rewriting the curriculum and setting forced time for the 3 R's is something they can stand up and say "look, we're doing stuff" where as school lunches were already in place so there was nothing for them to show to their voters.
Remember that the stats they're using to argue achievement is going real bad don't actually say that. They show lower achievement but the academics who look at the study & whatnot advise that that's because the methodology changed, not that achievement actually went down in real terms.
Haha yes, it reminds me of the show "are you smarter than a 7 (?) year old?" where they ask these random questions about ancient egypt or whatever and the adults get them wrong and the kids get them right because the kids just spent a term being taught the exact material.
Then imagine if you gave the kids a test on Ancient Rome when they had only studied Ancient Egypt, then said how much worse the results are getting.
I know you'd expect something like maths to be more generic and not change like my example, but different experiences of mine come to mind. I remember getting marked wrong for maths questions on estimation not because I didn't estimate well but because I wasn't using the method that they were teaching. I also remember working my way through Khan Acadamy and struggling with easy stuff (as an adult) because I was taught different terminology for things.
Yup, and then if I look back on when I learnt maths in primary school, 39-31 years ago. We wrote learnt a bunch of maths, but the bulk of it was dumb calculation that beyond a certain amount is just easier to whack into a calculator these days. Its like people have forgotten that sure, in the 80s we didn't have a calculator at hand all of the time, so being able to do it in your head was really beneficial. Nowadays everyone carries a powerful computer in their pocket and going beyond 3 digit equations its mostly better to get it right first time with the tool than risk getting it wrong in your head.
The same holds true with your Ancient Egypt - Ancient Rome analogy; what's important is not knowing facts about those two long dead civilisations, but knowing how to evaluate the various facts you might find with that pocket computer of yours and establish which is more likely to be reliable etc.