Elizabeth Street Primary School in Moe introduces a free universal lunch scheme through the Spoonfull pilot by Eat Up, aiming to address growing food insecurity and improve student wellbeing.
At Elizabeth Street Primary School in Moe, in Victoria’s east, lunch has become part of the lesson. On the menu recently were chicken pasta bake, tuna and salad rolls, and children were encouraged to help themselves generously. One pupil, Victoria, said she loved the food and enjoyed being able to choose from different options, including lasagne, butter chicken and wraps.
The meals are being supplied through Spoonfull, a pilot universal lunch programme from the charity Eat Up. The scheme gives every student at participating schools a free, healthy lunch each day, and it was formally introduced at the school’s Hearts and Hands Learning Kitchen after sustained lobbying from wellbeing officer Carol O’Reilly. O’Reilly said she had seen children arrive without sandwiches and now watched them head out to play with full stomachs. Principal Ian Frost said the programme had improved wellbeing and helped students perform better in class.
Eat Up said Spoonfull builds on its longer-running model of providing on-demand lunches, which has already delivered more than 6 million free meals to children across Australia. The organisation says it is the country’s only charity providing free lunches to students on a national scale, with volunteer teams making and delivering tens of thousands of lunches each week to schools across several states and territories. It says the new pilot is aimed at schools facing deeper and more persistent need, where a daily universal meal may be more practical than a case-by-case response.
The move comes as food insecurity remains a concern for many families. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2023 suggested roughly 16 to 22 per cent of Australian children experience food insecurity, with single-parent households and low-income families at greatest risk. Mr Galea said cost-of-living pressures were pushing more families towards support, including some who had previously managed without it. At Elizabeth Street Primary School, Spoonfull has also helped fund kitchen upgrades, including commercial fridges and ovens, with a dishwasher still hoped for. Eat Up wants to extend similar pilots to two more schools, and Victoria said she believed every school could benefit.
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