Kerre Woodham: With all the money we have spent, how are kids still going hungry at school?

It’s back to school today for many children and if your household was anything like ours, it's full of nervous excitement and brand-new school bags for a brand-new class.

Old mates and new mates. We cannot wait to hear the stories fresh off the playground on the first day back, and school should be exciting.

It should be something that children do look forward to. It should be a safe place where children are encouraged to learn and to see the world as somewhere where they can take their rightful place. And yet our truancy rates have never been worse. Just 39.9 percent of New Zealand children attended school and kura regularly last year.

There are many, many reasons for that but the implications for this country of dealing with a generation of semi-literate young New Zealanders is horrifying. The thing that gets me most is that awful waste of potential. Young people are ripe for learning. 

They may have come from pretty shabby backgrounds, but if you get them right, if they feel safe, if they feel secure, if they're fed, if they've got people who are feeding their minds, just not their bodies, then they will grow, and they will flourish.

They will be the best they can be, and that's got to be good for all of us. The new Children's Commissioner, Francis Eivers, has said that she is fully focused on lifting children out of poverty, but that is a lot harder than it sounds. We had a Prime Minister who was utterly committed to improving the lives of our most vulnerable kids and even her most generous supporters say that when she left office, the job was not done. 

Eivers says it's easy to forget that 20 kilometres down the road from where any one of us live, children are starving. But why are they starving? That's what I really want to know. 

From the Kick Start breakfasts put on by Sanitarium and Fonterra where there are Weet-Bix, there's milk, there's fruit. From the Kids Can charity, providing clothing and food, to the schools that qualify who have hungry kids, to the money you and I have spent, $216.7 million in operating funds, $3.9 million in capital expenditure to provide school lunches across the country.

If you go to school there should be no reason at all for you to be going to school hungry.  

If that's not working, then let's perhaps look at putting $220 million somewhere else to try and get the very best out of our most vulnerable kids.  

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