Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Roman Travers: Hungry kids falling behind at school - maybe we need to stop blaming our curriculum

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Roman Travers: Hungry kids falling behind at school - maybe we need to stop blaming our curriculum · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

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  Speaker 1: Although the school holidays are in full swing. Still that
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  Speaker 1: doesn't mean that the country's children are getting the food
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  Speaker 1: they need at home. New Zealand children are still going
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  Speaker 1: hungry at school, and that means they're going through and
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  Speaker 1: ending up years behind other children in key subjects. The
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  Speaker 1: data that shows this ongoing issue for us all also
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  Speaker 1: ranks New Zealand poorly for food poverty. The health researchers
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  Speaker 1: behind this just published analysis argue that government needs to
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  Speaker 1: double the number of children served by its newly revamped
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  Speaker 1: lunches in school scheme. It's no surprise that hungary students
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  Speaker 1: struggle to learn. Food poverty has been cited as a
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  Speaker 1: big barrier in New Zealand's scoring under the OECD's Program
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  Speaker 1: for International Student Assessment. A comparison between that and two
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  Speaker 1: other global data sets has allowed a team of researchers
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  Speaker 1: to look at the link in greater depth. After analyzing
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  Speaker 1: food and security levels after subject specific scores, the team
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  Speaker 1: reveiled to start trend, any degree of food and security
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  Speaker 1: was associated with much lower academic performance, a pattern that
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  Speaker 1: held across all subjects, age groups, and surveys. Professor Boyd
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  Speaker 1: Swinburne from Auckland University as a co author of the
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  Speaker 1: study I'm referring to, and he says he didn't expect
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  Speaker 1: the effect size to be so large. In all, it
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  Speaker 1: equated to a learning gap equivalent to hungry students trailing
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  Speaker 1: two to four years behind in subjects like maths and
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  Speaker 1: reading by age fifteen, and even after adjusting for socioeconomic indicators.
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  Speaker 1: Something else born to the study is that there's also
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  Speaker 1: a grady in effect. The more severe the food and security,
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  Speaker 1: the greater gap in scores compared to kids with no
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  Speaker 1: food insecurity. The problem doesn't just affect hungry children finding
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  Speaker 1: it harder to concentrate in class, but other factors, including
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  Speaker 1: parents keeping their kids home rather than facing stigma at school.
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  Speaker 1: It's all very well to blame the state of New
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  Speaker 1: Zealand's curriculum or the size of classrooms confronting our teachers,
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  Speaker 1: but when you may well address some of the demonstrably
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  Speaker 1: poor outcomes shown in the study by simply ensuring that
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  Speaker 1: our children are well fed and literally well catered for
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  Speaker 1: at school, what on earth are we waiting for? For
• 2:07
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