A New Zealand kindergarten teacher has been caught stealing food from her students' lunchboxes, according to the Waikato Times.

The case was one of 16 cases of serious misconduct of teachers in the NZ region of Waikato over the past five years that was obtained by the paper from the Teachers Council under the Official Information Act.

The 16 cases include sexual relations between teachers and students, child pornography, drug convictions and death threats.

The teacher caught stealing food from lunchboxes in 2011 was caught on closed-circuit camera removing food and either placing in it a plastic bag, her pockets or eating it.

Staff did not believe the children when they first raised the alarm that food was missing, a Teachers' Council Complaints Assessment Committee decision said.

"She emphasised that she was trying to put this incident behind her, that there would be no repetition, and that she was hoping to move on with her career," the decision said.

In another case, a male teacher had sexual relations with three male students over four years.

The teacher sent explicit text messages and sexual photographs of himself and made sexual sounds over the telephone to the students.