Humphreys made the announcement while on a visit to Scoil Treasa Naofa Primary School, Donore Avenue, Dublin 8. There are 181 pupils in Scoil Treasa Naofa enjoying and benefitting from hot meals every school-day.
The School Meals Programme has an annual budget of over €65 million, which supports over 1,500 schools and organisations nationwide and benefits over 230,000 children.
RSM Ireland has been appointed by the Department of Social Protection to conduct the evaluation of the School Meals Programme with recommendations to be provided for the Minister and her Department to consider as part of Budget 2023.
Humphreys said: “The School Meals Programme comes in a number of different shapes and forms including breakfasts, lunches, dinners, cold meals and hot meals. The hot school meals in particular has proven hugely popular and I am pleased to have increased the number of schools receiving hot school meals ten-fold since I became Minister, from a small pilot of just 30 schools to almost 300.
“The feedback I am getting anecdotally from teachers and parents is that children prefer the hot school meals to the cold option. I know from my own experience that a child is more likely to sit down and eat a good hot meal whereas a cold sandwich can always be shoved into the bottom of the school bag. Given the huge positivity towards the hot school meals programme, I now want to examine the option of expanding it so that more students can benefit.”
The focus of the School Meals Programme is to provide regular, nutritious food to children who may be unable, due to lack of good quality food, to take full advantage of the education provided to them. The programme is an important component of policies to encourage school attendance and extra educational achievement.
Key issues to be explored by the evaluation include:
- What is working well and what is not working so well
- What are the practicalities for schools of moving to a Hot School Meals option
- The extent to which the School Meals Programme has improved school attendance and educational achievement
- How the scheme compares with programmes in other countries
- What might the implications be of extending the scheme