School turned down funded breakfast club

[MightyGoldBear]

The school my children go to were part of the 750 selected, as the first roll outs for funded breakfast club. They turned it down! And said they won't do it even when it's rolled out for all schools.

It would of helped so many children and parents. Their reasoning was the school is too small. It's absolutely not.
Am I being unreasonable to find this so frustrating?

They don't offer after school club they don't offer any holiday clubs. I have a sen child who would really benefit with a soft transition into school. He has had periods of school refusal.
This is our nearest school. I don't drive (cant afford to learn, working is difficult with care needs) My sen child can't tolerate other transport than with me or his dad. We have no outside help.

It's just so frustrating that the school made all the right sounds at one point that they were going to offer more for children and parents. Only to turn it all down. With the cost of living crisis there will undoubtedly be children going to school hungry or sometimes just life happens and that chance to have breakfast or a soft transition would set more children up for the day. It just seems really rubbish of them to not even try a reduced scaled down version of it.

https://www.headteacher-update.com/content/news/can-you-provide-a-nutritious-school-breakfast-for-60p-per-pupil/

Hey OP I know it's not the actual school youre annoyed at which is good as it isn't their fault, my DH works in a primary school and they've actually accepted it and they are struggling massively already because of lack of staffing. It's been set up to fail like most things!

Thank you EverythingElseIsTaken.
So I assume there was no actual consultation with schools as to how much it would cost them to run breakfast clubs?

I live in a so-called deprived area and free breakfast clubs have been the norm since the 2000s at least. The primary schools offer free breakfast clubs and the main secondary school offers a free breakfast club and also a free teatime club where children from any school can have a cooked meal in the evening.

The survey was only ever a survey, it wasn’t supposed to get your hopes up. The results of the survey probably disagreed with your assertion that the school is too small.

They will have needed a lot of parents to be definite that they would have used it consistently for it to be viable and staffing it won’t have been easy.

It's a stupid and costly idea and a massive PITA for schools. They are not childcare and shouldn't be expected to provide breakfast. The Government can't keep loading responsibilities from other, failing, parts of the public sector onto schools. It would be easier and cheaper just to sling the kids who need feeding a box of weetabix every week.

Schools should focus on their core responsibility of teaching.

A small school with struggle in 64p a day per child for breakfast club due to the scales of economy. They will still need staff and food and it's cheaper for them to run when they have more kids going! 64p doesn't fund a lot!

Small comfort perhaps, but I am not sure it would be the soft start you're hoping for anyway. Communal breakfast with a load of primary school children has its own demands. I ate breakfast in groups of 40 plus for 7 years at boarding school. It's loud and really not a gentle start to the day at all. If he needs a soft start I would hope they can do much better for him than that.

The difficulty finding childcare is so frustrating - an ongoing battle for a lot of us with children with additional needs, and the reason I don't work.

We live very rural and small school. It is also one of the schools to trial it.
Funding is for 30 minutes only. So I still pay a set amount for an extra 10 minutes from 8am. ( but kids can come from 8.10am for the free 30 minutes.
Also where I live most parents drop of and pick up anyway.
I always felt need in cities is bigger than the countryside?

Of course not!

The government (whichever party is in power) throws about words like “funded” and people assume that schools won’t be out of pocket. Like the free school meals for all children in KS1 - NOT fully funded, extra costs met by measures such as cutting midday supervisors (older children spend their lunch break helping younger ones, cleaning tables etc.), cutting out meat (meat free Monday is now meat free Monday, tofu Tuesday and jacket spud Thursday) and trying to convince staff that eating their lunch at a tiny table with the 30 children they’ve been teaching morning is an appropriate way to spend their 40 minute lunch break.

It’s the usual government bollocks. They say they’ll do something and fund it, but the funding is insufficient. So schools/hospitals/GPs etc don’t do it, and the government sit back and say “well it’s not our fault, we offered to fund it”.

More to the point, at 60p per child, it's going to take 21 kids' funding to cover just one TA on NMW for an hour. But if the children are mostly 5, the normal ratio for supervision is 1 for 30 children, giving them £5.40 to pay for everything else including the food. If you add in under 5s then the ratio is impossible to meet and fund at the same time.

I’m a GP and it’s exactly like all the crap we get. I’ll be driving to work, and the news on the radio announces something like “from next month, all over 65s will be offered a health check at their GP surgery” and I think hey, what? No one told me. Who’ll be doing that I wonder, where will we find the time?

I think it’s a deliberate attempt at making the public blame the overworked service providers, rather than the government themselves. And it works, sadly.

Exactly.
And if parents can’t afford to feed their kids, the government should be looking at why the hell that is. Not asking schools to pick up the slack.

I work in a MAT leadership role and your school might be one of ours as we have pulled out.

Presently the schools offer breakfast club that costs £2 per day (35 mins). As an example, 40 children out of 420 might attend on any one day so the income per session for the school is £80. This covers and additional 1.5 hours of staff costs - 2 TAs who set up, supervise and clear down (around £25 with on costs) and the cost of food (around £30 per day) and supplies (£5) with a small surplus of around £20 per day that the school uses to a) provide free provision for PP children and those in needs and prop up their tight budgets. The income from breakfast club for a school averages around £3k a year.

To offer the same provision under the government funding we would have income of around £25-30 per day (the 60p is uplifted depending on the % of PP in the school) against the same costs of around £60 - unless we reduce staff or the quality/quantity of food (cue, parent complaints) - so will make a loss of around £4K per year which is an actual loss of around £7k when you account for the fact the school currently has a surplus.

Sadly, the scheme isn't being funded properly, and very few schools can afford to run this kind of thing at a loss.

60p per child is insufficient for many schools to run this service.

We’ve had funded breakfast clubs in Wales for a while. Works fine. It’s only free from 8:20 costs £3 before that. It’s not over run by parents who don’t feed their kids breakfast as far as I can see it’s used by parents who need to drop off early to get to work. I don’t understand why everyone in England was so against it????

@VeterinaryCareAssistant they'll be using "pupil premium" money (money for low income families/adopted children/children in care). The problem with the new scheme is that it's not properly funded, but schools in areas with high deprivation would be using different funding for it, so it won't matter.

OP, I agree. It's really frustrating to have yet another unfunded and not viable thing rolled out for the headlines.

Dds school has also opted out.

They hire out their dining hall and assembly hall to a before school club that ferries children to a couple of local schools and opens at 7.30 . Losing the income from that would be too big a loss to carry.

As pp have said it’s likely a funding issue. Schools are at the edge and have little to no room to pick up more costs.

@SalfordQuays and @BlackBean2023 have nailed the reasons why this won't work.

I have worked in education for many years, only one primary I worked in had a breakfast club, run by the school. It was exceptionally well-run on a shoestring, and currently costs £4 per child, per day (runs from 7.45am).

The proposed provision is very underfunded, and since BoJo's Covid 'management', Govt seems to prefer to invent and declare policy on the hoof, instead of as a carefully thought out response to consultation or anything else. Although, in all honesty, I can't recall a UK Government doing the latter - they seem to ignore most of the green and white papers.

In every place of education I have worked, for ages 4-18, there are always students who are hungry for one reason or another. Sadly, it is often the case that parents don't have the money to buy food. Thankfully, in my workplaces, either the school office had cereal/toast available or colleagues kept cereal bars in their desks. Before anyone panics, we all have strict no nut policies. Parents are then signposted to food banks if needed - but they're only meant to last for 3 days, and you are often told you can't reapply for several months afterwards. If you're struggling for longer than that, it's hard, and it makes you feel really ashamed as a parent when it's often due to factors totally out of your control eg late payment from work or UC, unexpected bills.

People need to write to their MPs and ask for better funding.

I was speaking to someone who works in school finance, they won't be rolling it out if they can help it! Can't afford to run at a loss

The whole ‘breakfast clubs for all’ idea is ridiculous. What would have helped parents more is for the childcare hours from 9 months to be properly funded.

Plus I do believe it’s just a way lengthen the school day without actually saying that’s what it is.