To think that free breakfast at school is a bad idea due to the quality?

I don't know where you get your evidence that a school breakfast is worse quality than most kids get at home. As a supply teacher, I see loads of breakfast clubs' food and it is usually buttered bagels or brown toast, cornflakes or similar (none of the high sugar varieties), fruit and yoghurts. Only water to drink because of the budget, but water is the best thing you can give them. Left-over bagels are given out at break-time and they are very popular.

But it isn’t just about the money! Porridge with banana or in-season fruit is cheap, but they won’t serve it in schools cos lots of the kids won’t eat it - or someone thinks they won’t.

All our schools have a salad bar and serve healthy food at lunch time.
The rules about what can be served are very strict.

We are not providing any breakfast in some schools but the ones where we do have a waiting list because the kids enjoy the food.

Yes, yes and yes again

Completely agree!

Feel superior do we ? Hoist those judgy pants up a bit higher

There are a few comments on this thread that suggest families who neglect their children to the extent of not having food should have children removed,

I’m the safeguarding lead at an urban secondary school- the threshold for removal is so unbelievably high that most people not working within the system wouldn’t believe it. I can’t even get outside agency support for children who are being neglected at this level, never mind the SS input needed to move to legal proceedings.

Schools are the only agency who cannot, and do not, step away from supporting children and families.

I can’t actually remember the last time I had a conversation about curriculum, or my teaching practice- all my time is soaked up trying to keep children in school and safe.

A breakfast club is part of that.

We really don’t have the resources to be teaching children to make their own yogurt, either. <laughs, in a way anyone who works in safeguarding will understand>

So does ours but the session costs about £6 from 7.30 to the start of school which is significantly more than the breakfast club funding from the government

I totally agree with you. It’s shit. The country is shit and so broken, it can’t be fixed.

Why would you ever introduce your child to chocolate breakfast cereal in the first place though?! My kids don’t know it exists.

So why are they not even fully funding the dinner that they put on years ago? That could do with getting sorted first. Schools shouldn't have to cut classroom support to feed kids who can afford it because the government withdrew funding a year after it was introduced.

A cheap and cheerful breakfast is better than no breakfast.

But I agree that school dinners are absolute shite. My dc's school serve very strange dishes such as chickpea and sweet potato roast, hot dog jambalaya or roasted vegetable and cranberry slice. I appreciate the effort they make to include some vegetables but how many children will eat that? Even if those dishes were nice, the mass produced versions shipped out to schools are most certainly not. Why can't they just have some grilled chicken, veg and roast potatoes? Because money 😕

There’s money to give breakfasts to kids that don’t need it though?
money for the speaker to go on jaunts wherever
money for mp expenses fir dinners and drinks out etc.

there’s s lot of money, it’s just not being well spent, or being spent on votes and headlines.

Sure Start was supposed to try to break the cycle of dysfunctional families and generations repeating the same poor choices. Austerity impacted it severely.
Some schools have community rooms with washer and dryer so parents can wash clothes at school. They use PEF monies or pupil premium if it's still called that down south.
Bluntly, we have a very broken society and austerity measures took away proper intervention which actually did some good, and all that's left is a series of sticking plasters. They hold something together for a while but it doesn't solve the underlying societal problems.

Absolutely agree with you. Healthy choices when young correlates with healthy living later in life.
There is far too much UPF in the British diet

There are strict guidelines about what can be served in school.

Governors bear responsibility to ensure all meals are healthy.

All our schools provide good healthy food and the cost is never covered by the income.

we are not providing breakfast at some schools because it takes us further into a deficit budget.

if you think your child is being served rubbish you need to challenge the school.

Should the teachers fund this or should the school cut staff to fund it?

Like in Continental Europe it would be best if they have on offer home made whole grain bread, cheeses, hard boiled eggs, jam, fruit and porridge. That is not that expensive.

It’s very easy to pontificate on mn ‘they should do xyz’, not so easy when it’s real life

You think that’s not already happening ?

This.

@ThisDandyWriter the children are actually making it into school. Yes, possibly unfed, dirty clothes, not washed. It may well be older sibling getting the younger ones up and out the door. But they're pitching up at school so there is some functionality in the home, however minimal.
There are too many children in the care of local authorities for the number of foster carers that we have, so lowering the threshold of what is considered negligence would add to a long-standing problem. Simply put, where would these children go?

support for the parents, better support and pay fir foster parents, more social workers, more support for schools.
not shit breakfasts offered to a lot of people that don’t need it to get votes and headlines. It’s just more poor use of funds that could be better spent elsewhere.

This. It's better for a well nourished child to eat upf than for a neglected child to not eat anything

Isn’t the point of OP’s post that why, as a society, do we think it’s acceptable that children from less privileged backgrounds are deemed ok to eat an unhealthy UPF laden breakfast? And should we not be aiming to give every child a nutritious, non crap breakfast? Or is it ok for poor kids to eat crap on the state?