Breakfast clubs

The Department for Education (DfE) has announced that up to 750 schools will be invited to test the delivery of breakfast clubs in primary schools ahead of a national rollout.

The guidance confirms that the government is committed to offering a free breakfast club in every primary school in England. This will build on the national wraparound childcare programme and national school breakfast programme and will launch in April 2025. One is a service to enable parents to work and the other a service to improve attendance and learning through the provision of food.

The programme will focus on how breakfast clubs can be delivered in a way that:

• Builds on what is already happening in schools
• Meets the needs of parents
• Ensures children start the day ready to learn.

Further information on how schools can take part in the scheme and the model the scheme will follow, will be shared in the second half of the autumn. Early adopter schools will be confirmed by early 2025 and the scheme will launch in the summer term (April 2025). Schools that wish to find out more about becoming an early adopter can sign up using the early adopter breakfast clubs expression of interest form to be notified as further information becomes available. This new scheme looks like it will bring together the needs of all families within one service.

How places will be funded is currently unknown. At present, working parents pay for childcare. Within the national school breakfast programme participating schools will receive a 75% subsidy for the food and delivery costs of breakfast club provision until the end of July 2025 and schools will contribute 25% of the costs. All pupils in participating schools are to be offered breakfast supplies at no cost to them or their parents.

Whilst Labour previously pledged to roll out fully-funded breakfast clubs to all primary schools in England, the plan has faced criticism – the Institute for Fiscal Studies previously warned that: “Labour’s proposed breakfast clubs are part of a set of measures that would involve channelling support for children and families through schools. This kind of mission creep may present additional challenges for schools already struggling with pay, workload and recruitment pressures for teachers and teaching assistants – and with little in the way of guaranteed increases to core funding to help them cope.”

At the conference a representative from the Jamie Oliver Group asked an education minister whether Labour’s breakfast club plan for primary schools will come with mandatory standards for the quality of food, and what the experience of breakfast should be for children. The minister said: “It’s very clear to me as a new minister in the department that the current standards we have and the guidance issued to schools is grossly out of date and needs looking at.”