David Seymour wants future where every student intervention is tracked, including school lunch

Act party leader David Seymour hopes the Ministry of Education will collect better data from students, and more of it, Businessdesk reports.

Seymour has his school lunches portfolio in mind when he thinks of areas that badly need better metrics around it.

In an interview with BusinessDesk, Seymour said he hoped the Government would make progress on an ambitious student data collection programme to track the effectiveness of the Government’s various student interventions — such as school lunches.

“Where we should be going as a Government, and I hope where we’ll have the capability to go, is to say every student has a national student number [and] every time we do an intervention we tag them and say ‘well, if we look at students that had the following XYZ intervention, where are they now compared with other similar students who may not have?’”

Seymour said assessing the value for money of the Ka Ora, Ka Ako school lunch programme was very difficult, given the lack of metrics put in place early on and the long lead time needed to properly judge some of its effects.

Read the full BusinessDesk story here.