KickStart Breakfasts and Indicators of Child Health in Linked Administrative Data

Government has been co-funding an expanded KickStart school breakfast programme since 2013, which was started in 2009 by Fonterra and Sanitarium. Through the programme school communities are supported to run KickStart Breakfast clubs, which includes providing the schools with milk and Weet-Bix cereal for the clubs.

Participating schools and kura are overwhelmingly positive about the KickStart breakfast programme.

This study was commissioned to add to the evidence about the programme, and specifically to provide a quantitative assessment of the impact of KickStart on students’ health outcomes using linked de-identified data in the Stats NZ Integrated Data Infrastructure.

The study found that students aged under 13 enrolled in schools and kura with higher uptake of KickStart are significantly less likely than their peers to have hospital outpatient visits for dental surgery.

The study was not able to draw conclusions about the degree to which reduced outpatient visits for dental surgery were caused by KickStart alone, given that other programmes could be operating in schools. However, there are plausible mechanisms that could link the two.

The evaluation of KickStart Breakfasts was prepared by a team of researchers from the Ministry of Social Development’s Research and Evaluation team, Oranga Tamariki and Motu Economic and Public Policy Research.