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This article first appeared in our print Spotlight Party Politics Special, published on 15 November 2024. Read the full supplement here.
By 8.45am on a bright spring morning at the St John’s Primary School in east London, pupils were nearing the end of their hour-long morning breakfast club – eating buttered bagels, creating arts and crafts, and playing Connect 4 with friends.
Teddy, who is in Year 6, arrived an hour earlier. “I’ll usually come very early, like before breakfast club even opens,” he told me as we hung out in the school’s assembly hall. His hair tied in a topknot, he rocked up and down with his hands behind his back – shy, yet proud, of his role as organiser-in-chief: “I normally put some games out, and then I have my breakfast… and when it’s pack-up time, I [help the teachers] put the tables, mats and games away.”
Well over a dozen children turned up to the club on the day of my visit to Bethnal Green. In collaboration with the Magic Breakfast charity, the school runs the club throughout the week during term-time and provides pupils with a number of breakfast options – bagels, porridge, baked beans and a selection of fruits. Magic Breakfast charges partner schools a small yearly fee to help join its programme, and a number of corporate partners donate food specifically to the charity.
Schools are required to provide children with food that has limited amounts of salt and sugar. “I know, like, the school’s trying to be healthy but sometimes you just need a bit of sugar,” Teddy confided. Has he asked for more? “Yeah. They said no.”
Teddy appeared to be making a wider point about the energy needed to get through the school day. “When I have my breakfast I feel more energetic and want to do my work. Sometimes when you don’t have your breakfast… you don’t feel at your happiest… it’s hard to focus because your belly’s hurting.”
The school is located in Tower Hamlets, a borough with the highest child poverty rate in the UK: 48 per cent of children live in poverty in the area. Though some of the children are aware of the wider socio-economic context, the breakfast club is an obvious hive of fun, energy and bonding. “I would say these [clubs] are really important,” Teddy told me as the start of the school day approached. “They give kids a chance to meet friends and have a good breakfast – but also, even just to have a breakfast in general.”
The term-time morning scenes witnessed at St John’s will soon become commonplace in primary schools across England. Labour pledged to introduce free school breakfast clubs in all primary schools as part of its fifth, education-based, mission for government – to “Break down barriers to opportunity”. An “early adopter” trial in selected schools will begin in April 2025, ahead of a future nationwide rollout, likely from the start of the 2025/26 academic year. A Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which puts the requirement for the school breakfast clubs into law, is due to be debated early next year.
Two years ago, Bridget Phillipson, then shadow education secretary, outlined the policy as part of Labour’s plans to build a “modern” childcare system: “One that gives our children the start to their day, and the start to their life, they deserve,” she said during her speech announcing the measure at the 2022 Labour Party conference. Phillipson made an explicit link between a child’s wellbeing and bolstering the nation’s finances. Labour’s free school breakfast club plan and childcare system is “one that gives… our economy a chance to grow,” she said.
Around 4.3 million children are growing up in poverty in the UK, according to official government figures. And an estimated 2.7 million children are living in households that are struggling to afford or access sufficient food.
The moral case for giving children breakfast in the morning is clear. “We’re always drumming into the children what a good start to the day looks like,” St John’s deputy headteacher, Baljinder Jheeta, told me after the morning’s breakfast club. “[Breakfasts] make a big, big difference in the children being really clear in [thinking] ‘I need to eat something in order for me not to feel hungry and for me to do my work’.”
It’s “an investment in our young people,” Chancellor Rachel Reeves told the Labour Party conference in September, with Labour now in government. She quickly added that it is “an investment in our economy”, too.
So how much return is Labour expecting on its investment in children through the means of breakfast? The Department for Education (DfE) would not reveal whether it has conducted a cost-benefit analysis on the policy when approached by Spotlight. Magic Breakfast, however, has conducted some research of its own. It estimates that if all of the estimated 298,000 disadvantaged primary school pupils in England were to receive the charity’s model of breakfast provision, it could generate £2.7bn worth of economic returns. “We’re very focused on a stigma-free approach,” Mark Hoda, policy and public affairs manager at Magic Breakfast told me, sitting alongside Jheeta in the headteacher’s office. ”We want to be stigma-free, barrier-free, for all the kids.”
However, there are potential gaps in the policy that could jeopardise the social and economic gains that would otherwise come from the measure. One concern centres on the lack of provision for the meals that follow breakfast.
“Children don’t just stop at the mid-morning point,” said Nikita Sinclair, co-programme director of children’s health and food, at the Impact on Urban Health (IOUH) non-profit. “We need to make sure that children have access to the food that they need to thrive throughout the school day.” The current eligibility threshold for children to receive free school meals at lunchtime is “woefully low”, she added. (A family on Universal Credit must have a yearly household income of £7,400 or less to qualify.)
Across all stages of school, over 900,000 children living below the poverty line are not eligible for free school meals, according to analysis from the Child Poverty Action Group. In England, universal free school meals are only provided to children in reception, Year 1 and Year 2. In London, meanwhile, mayor Sadiq Khan introduced free school meals for all primary-aged students in the capital for the duration of the 2023-24 school year. In January, he extended it to cover the current academic year. Khan has described the policy, which will cost City Hall £140m this year, as a “lifeline” to children and families.
How could this “meal gap” – children receiving breakfast but not lunch – affect learning, and ultimately, long-term life chances? Policymaking that doesn’t consider providing “food across the school day is just limiting the clear benefits that can be gained from investing in school food,” said Sinclair. A recent study on the London Mayor’s meals by IOUH found that had a positive impact on physical and mental health and wellbeing, as well as strengthening school communities.
Next year, primary school children in London will receive both free breakfasts (from the government) and lunches from Khan, who recently said that “as long as I am Mayor of this great city, I will make sure we carry on with this fantastic policy”.
In contrast, many children in poorer parts of the country could go without a second major meal in the middle of the day. “I think it’s a real equity issue,” said Sinclair, expressing concern about the potential widening of educational attainment gaps between London and the rest of the country. Issues of food insecurity are not exclusive to primary school students. “School food policy today often has focused on expanding entitlement in primary [settings], which is obviously a really positive thing,” Sinclair noted, “but children don’t end Year 6 and then suddenly [have] their circumstances massively change. They’re still affected by their household and family income, and how that impacts the food that’s available and accessible to them.”
Last year, Keir Starmer acknowledged the lively “debate taking place across all of society and particularly in the Labour Party,” but refused to commit an incoming Labour government to a policy of free school meals. “The money is a big factor,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “I won’t shy away from it.”
Just like breakfasts, there is a strong moral and economic case in investing in lunches. Something that is backed up by research: a 2022 IOUH analysis costed a £24.2bn investment in universal free school meals for all pupils over the next 20 years with a £41.3bn “core return” to the economy. The return comes from the positive effects the food would have on children’s collective education, health and nutrition, and later employment pathways. The research also estimates a further £58.2bn of “wider benefits” based on the future workforce productivity boosts that better educated children provide. It brings the total potential payback to £99.5bn.
“We know from our research and from the work of our partners that school food is a huge opportunity for both children’s health and investing in the economy. That can only be maximised by ensuring that food throughout the day is nutritious [and] accessible to all children,” Sinclair said. “There’s so many families that really need support in accessing good food just from a food insecurity perspective, let alone for the kind… [of] long-term economic benefits that that might bring.”
Whatever the framing, the reality is the same: child poverty is strongly linked to economic stagnation. Last month’s Budget provided more clarity on Labour’s breakfast plan which forms part of a wider £2.3bn boost to core school funding.
A concern heading into Reeves’ speech on 30 October was the future of the current National Schools Breakfast Programme (NSBP), brought in by the Conservatives in 2018. Under the programme, government provides a 75 per cent subsidy to schools in the most disadvantaged areas to put on morning breakfast clubs. Crucially, the scheme – which serves 350,000 children each day – applies to all school settings (such as secondary, special educational needs, and disabilities and alternative provision schools). Funding for the latest cycle was set to end in summer 2025.
Following concern from across the sector prior to the Budget, the government has now confirmed that the new breakfast programme will also continue to serve the approximately 2,700 schools currently benefitting from the NSBP. “Investment in breakfast clubs will triple to over £30m next year,” a DfE spokesperson told Spotlight after October’s Budget. “We will work closely with the sector as we develop the universal breakfast club programme, ensuring that every child is ready to learn at the start of the school day, and helping drive improvements to behaviour, attendance and attainment.”
In recognition of the cross-departmental work needed to reverse the current status quo, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is leading a new Child Poverty Strategy taskforce alongside Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary. A joint foreword in a policy paper stresses that “tackling child poverty is both a moral imperative and crucial to building a stronger society and economy.“
The taskforce will set out its full strategy next spring and will use all the “levers” available to government – those “related to household income as well as employment, housing, children’s health, childcare and education”.
“You will all rightly push me to go faster, to go further, every single day – that is your job,” Kendall told an audience at a Labour Party conference panel I chaired on ending the need for emergency food provision, such as food banks (another government commitment). “I have a different job; I have to look at [and] be part of a Labour government, which is looking not only at all of these [food-related] issues, but the rest of the horror,” she added. It was nod towards the long fix-list the Cabinet is seeking to prioritise and fund.
Kendall said she was “annoyed” at the chair of a prior event on child poverty, who described the free school breakfast plan as “window dressing”. “And I thought, ‘You think food in your belly as a child every morning is ‘window dressing’? You know nothing about what people are struggling with,” Kendall said. “That [the breakfast clubs pledge] is a huge thing that we are doing.” But the state of the public finances means that wholesale improvements for all members of society “will take time”, she added.
I asked if bolder ambitions – such as universal free school meals – would come in the medium-to-long term, when public finances have theoretically recovered. Kendall was light on policy detail. “We are Labour, and we believe, as one great man once said, in ‘Prudence for a purpose’” – an allusion to Gordon Brown’s tagline from his welfare-bolstering 1998 Budget.
“[Our] purpose is driving up opportunity and driving down poverty in every part of the land,” she added. “We believe in this, not just to balance the books – although that is essential – [but] because you can’t build a better country if the foundations aren’t strong.
“We believe that in this country, when you don’t have food in your belly or a roof over your head, you can’t fulfil your potential as a child. If people can’t fulfil their potential, our country can’t be as good as it needs to be. So these two things go hand in hand.”