Free school breakfast for every child

Dear goddess.
No the miner's did not get strike pay but the government treated them as if they had.

Pregnant women were told to eat veg feelings.

In those days utilities could be cut off regardless of who lived in the property.

Entire communities went down, shops lost all their business.

The ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ had nothing to do with mining, the ‘blackstuff’ was tarmac. It was about the general recession and not being skilled enough to easily get a job.

Maybe I should have used a new paragraph instead of a full stop.

I was trying to illustrate how people went hungry, not just miners and their families.

Miners earned very good money when compared to other jobs. When they didn’t have money, they had chosen to strike. Which they did a lot. It was inevitable that mining would decrease as with building ships and making steel. Our wage structures were too expensive when compared to Korea and China.

As we all know, there were no replacement jobs that paid as well. There’s now a legacy of under achieving dc in many of these areas that appears cultural. The only way around this is growth in the economy but, even when we have success, like JLR, we buy Chinese cars instead. We kill off our own industry.

I would rather they gave a decent breakfast , with proper protein ( eggs, cheese,beans etc, plus juice or fruit) to the kids who really need it rather than a cheap toast/ cereal breakfast to anyone who fancied it.

The legacy of underachieving links straight back to what’s still occurring in Cleveland.

@viques Who is paying for that? Ultimately parents must be responsible. I agree that toast is not breakfast but we have to look deeply at the families who are not feeding dc - it’s almost certainly chaotic families with numerous issues and probably numerous dc. They are probably the families whose dc miss loads of school or who won’t arrive in time for breakfast. Instead of everyone getting toast, we need more effort going into the few who are not managing to be decent parents.

Exactly this. I’ve taken a hard line through this thread but we should be condoning their absolute failures by providing get outs for those few.

Im not against the idea in principle but I wonder how it will work in terms of staff, and costs to the provider. A lot of nurseries struggled when the "free" 15 and 30 hours was brought in because the government allocated £x per session when it actually cost more. One nursery in our town closed because they couldn't make it work.

I lived in a 5 bed house, I was taken abroad 2 or 3 times a year

I only had breakfast if I made it myself.

Who actually has that stuff for breakfast. 90% of kids it will be a bowl of frosties or weetabix.
Regardless of where they eat it.

Lots of kids eat better breakfasts than a bowl of cereal. And for kids whose diets aren't wonderful in the first place a good breakfast is more important.

I mean, I am sure there are some perfect parents (well, mothers), who get up at 6am and lovingly prepare a cooked breakfast and cut up fresh fruit.

But we all have to be up, washed, dressed, argued and out the door, some leaving at 7:30, the last of us leaving at 8:30.

I am a stay at home mum, I’m not going to be doing that. None of my family want anything more than a slice of toast or a banana early in the morning and half of us don’t eat breakfast at all.

I don’t see many parents having the time to make a cooked breakfast such as scrambled eggs in the morning anyway. Not much wrong with a slice of white toast and lick of butter in the morning, served my twin brother and I well for 13 years of weekday breakfasts.

We were fortunate enough to have that provided before we left the house, not all pupils are sadly.

Glad I'm not alone thinking cearel and toast is a fairly normal breakfast.

Btw milk is apparently a very good source of protein

My point was that for children who are having a varied and adequate diet averaging over the week day/ week end with sufficient amounts of protein, fruit and vegetables, fats and carbs etc then an extra piece of toast every morning is of little nutritional consequence, so it seems ridiculous to offer it to them for “free”. But if you are a child whose diet is already poor then losing five chances a week to improve the overall quality of that diet is a missed opportunity and offering a better quality breakfast to those children would be a more cost effective way to spend limited funding

sorry for not making my observation clearer.

I think you are missing the point entirely. For some children it is sheer calories they need. And toast with butter is a very good way of getting that into them. Quick, easy and cheap. I’d bet good money you could only make one nutrient dense, fully rounded breakfast for every hundred rounds of toast. So in terms of cost / benefit toast for everyone is a better option.

And also a lot of the time free breakfasts clubs aren't really about the breakfasts its about childcare and parents being able to get into work for 9 or just after, rather than 9.30,