Dr Will Payne from SIT’s School Sport and Exercise, recently achieved a professional milestone, his PhD, and is now a Doctor of Philosophy, adding his expertise and insight to the body of work in the field of children’s nutrition, health, and social sciences.

The right timing to complete a PhD presented itself six years ago when the opportunity was offered to Dr Payne; he and two other colleagues from the School of Sport and Exercise decided to take it on.

Dr Payne’s doctorate topic and area of research came about through his coaching. “I coached at my son’s school and it was always a challenge to coach the children.” He’d noticed at lunchtime they didn’t want to perform. When he looked at what the children were eating for lunch, contents included a lot of packaged and processed foods, and some didn’t have any lunch at all.

“I could understand why they were not performing well when I was coaching them,” he explained. The research period coincided with a free healthy school lunch programme which had been introduced to some schools as a pilot by the government in 2019, to see if it was feasible to be rolled out around the country.

Most countries around the world (83%) have supplied school lunches – including India, Europe and America. Many countries started their lunch programmes post-World War 2, and with those who historically had the infrastructure as well. “418 million children get fed worldwide. New Zealand is quite unusual,” Dr Payne noted, adding a difference in NZ schools, was generally there was no designated place to eat lunches, but also culturally, “you shouldn’t eat where you work”.  

The research investigated teachers, principals and children’s perspectives of the school lunch programme, and to ascertain “were they all saying the same thing”, when comparing results from before school lunches were introduced, to after school lunches were provided.

For teachers, were there noticeable/measurable changes after introducing the school lunches, in academic, physical and cognitive functions and would it make a difference to their teaching. For principals, their before-and-after perspectives were recorded - what did they perceive would happen, and what actually did happen. For children, what did they enjoy about the lunches and what could have been done better.

From the research findings, Dr Payne uncovered a range experiences, both positive and negative. Teachers generally agreed the free healthy lunch programme would help, however they had concerns about time impacts - the provided lunches taking up more of the school day - based on previous experiences. “They had opinions because of the free milk programme; getting kids to eat meals, the mess – especially the younger children - again produced time issues, but they did see the positive aspects of it,” he said. Providing a blanket model for all different regions across the country was another issue.

While the principals and teachers loved the idea, to avoid the stigma of having a free lunch provided – a big concern for principals – it would need to apply to everybody, and therefore the programme’s success was also tied to making food that most children were more likely to eat. And this was an issue revealed during the research; it showed some children weren’t eating the food as it was too different compared to the food they’d normally eat at home, Dr Payne explained.

This led to food wastage; cost and waste ended up being one of the biggest issues. “It was quite significant. $50,000 per week of wasted food in 25% of schools across NZ... Southland had quite big numbers,” he said. At the schools involved, some thought the money could be better spent on teachers and teacher aides; they saw that  “it ties up a lot of dollars which could be used elsewhere”.

As a parent, he personally thought the programme was amazing, and noted his son ate what he was given. But some other children wouldn’t eat the food provided. It went to two-thirds of children at participating schools, with a third opting out because of the variety of foods offered.

Dr Payne pointed out that there was a difference between providing a free lunch programme and a healthy lunch programme. “One’s about ensuring the child eats during the school day, the other’s about children accessing healthy foods at school,” and concludes meeting those two different objectives perhaps couldn’t be effectively covered in the one programme. “The big positives were that children were eating a provided lunch at school, and this was one less task for [working] parents.”

Dr Payne utilises his PhD in running the Master’s programme in Sport and Exercise at SIT. “Whenever we educate ourselves it gets used in every area of our lives,” he noted, and aims to keep improving and progressing by drawing from his research and his years of training athletes. “We say to our students, do a great job, put all your effort into your studies, because you don’t know when and where the opportunities will come.”