School lunch that burnt student wrongly reheated - Ministry of Education

A Bay of Plenty deputy principal said their school lunches are so hot when they arrive that staff have to wear rubber gardening gloves to handle them.

It follows news that a Gisborne student received second-degree burns when one of the meals was dropped and splashed on their leg.

It's just the latest problem facing the recently introduced school lunch programme, which the government said will save taxpayers $130 million a year.

Stephen Knightly, the deputy principal at Te Puke Intermediate, told Checkpoint staff and students use the gloves when they are moving the meals from the delivery truck into boxes for different classes.

"We had a look at what our options were and realised that the surgical gloves would not work, and oven mitts were too fiddly to use to transport them to the class boxes. We found the gardening gloves that you get from your local DIY shop were suitable."

"They have the rubber on the fingertips, so it just keeps you from getting hot hands. When you're managing 516 of those lunches and you're doing it repetitively one after the other, it certainly gets quite hot. "

He said since the School Lunch Collective have been providing flexible lunches from Watties, the lunches are not holding up during the reheating process.

"They've been cooked or heated up in the oven at the local kitchen, travelling from Hamilton to the central manufacturing point to one of those 28 kitchens around New Zealand."

"They get reheated there and what's happening is they're not holding. The lids are bursting the plastic seal and then when they get stacked on top of each other, that creates that weight and then they just burst."

When describing the cottage pie meals, Knightly said "It's a cottage pie massacre inside the box, there's mince spilling out all over the sides into the boxes."

For four years, through the school lunch programme, the school was provided with meals from a local cafe.

"We're part of this programme, which we're incredibly grateful to be a part of. Don't get me wrong, we've got a number of students who, for whatever reason, are not able to have these types of meals on a regular basis. So this could be their main source of a nutritious meal throughout the day."

However, since the school has been provided with meals from the School Lunch Collective, they've been faced with a raft of issues.

"Lunches don't arrive, or they're two hours late, or they've exploded, we have to solve that problem from our end."

"Our students will be eating at 2:30. They go home at 3."

"It was an additional three hours on Tuesday, and by Wednesday I'd clocked up over seven hours of additional time trying to fix the problems."

On one day, 45 special dietary lunches didn't arrive, he said.

"What do I do? Have our children go hungry? That's not going to happen. So we have to solve that problem. If the lunches burst, we have to solve that problem."

While eating their lunch, one student bit into a piece of plastic inside a meatball, he said

"I spoke to the lunch collective and our ministry advisor and I had to send through images of it. In fact, they came and collected the piece of plastic, and a student basically chomped down on it."

Knightly said he has put through several complaints to the School Lunch Collective.

"I'm emailing the lunch collective regularly and initially for the first couple of weeks it would take days to get a response. I know that they've now hired or employed more staff in the call centre and people to be able to respond to our needs, but unfortunately it's still a slow process."

The lunches have been hours late on several occasions, because the local kitchens are under resourced, he said.

"The people who are working at our local kitchen are working their absolute backsides off and I've actually gone there myself to see what's going on and to actually pick up the lunches one day because I had no option but to do an hour round trip to get the lunches back to school."

He said he spoke to someone who works in the kitchen for the School Lunch Collective.

"We're talking about people who are working really hard, I could see how stressed they were, how hard they were working, how under-resourced they were."

The Watties flexible lunches are bigger than the previous School Lunch Collective meals and they are unable to fit as many in the ovens to heat up, he said.

"They were also bursting in the oven, which means that some of those lunches, as they pull them out, they're having to discard them before they even get to us anyway."

Meal that burnt student not suitable for commercial ovens

Earlier today, an officer from New Zealand Food Safety visited the facility which heated the lunch that later burnt a Gisborne student.

A message from the Ministry of Education to education peak bodies, published on social media by education union NZEI Te Riu Roa this afternoon, said lunch provider Compass had been instructed not to use those packaged meals again.

The message said the ministry had asked the Ministry for Primary Industries to expand its investigation into the school lunch programme to include heating practices.

In a statement to Checkpoint, Deputy director-general Vincent Arbuckle said:

"From information initially provided it appears there was an issue with the reheating process.

"The Ministry of Education (MoE) has instructed Compass Group not to serve these particular types of packaged meals again in the programme, as they were never intended to be reheated in a commercial oven."

A wider investigation is under way.

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.