Free school breakfast for every child

[greyingunderneath]

Is this a good use of funding? I am not very well off financially but I don’t mind providing a slice of toast for my child and can’t say it will make any difference to me financially if they provide it instead.
I don’t know how much this is costing the government but it seems like a waste of resources to me.

Disagree. Ensuring that kids have some food in them before the start of the school day sets them up to learn and also helps ensure that kids get in on time to learn. It's levelling up the playing field.

It’s partly to feed kids but also partly about making it easier for people to get to work in the morning, and they want more of us working more hours

This. If it's not for everyone, then it won't reach the ones that really need it (stigma etc).

No free. Taxes...

Absolutely appalling idea. It's junk food, white bread and puffed cereal. Working parents have to use wraparound to get to work on time, but then the child ends up having sugary cereal instead of a proper breakfast like scrambled eggs.

My sister has a nightmare as her children either end up eating twice or eating much poorer quality food than she would give them.

If children are not fed in the morning it's a social care issue. They should be fed, but separately at school from the wraparound whilst social care sort out why the child isn't being fed.

The difficulty would be determining which children need the free breakfast and ensuring they can access it and without drawing attention to them. Therefore its more straight forward to offer it to all.

Kids do not learn or behave well on an empty stomach. If free breakfasts provide a calmer classroom then I am all for it.

it only takes one hungry child to disrupt learning for the other 29.

Plus I would rather that one child wasn’t hungry and stood a chance at learning thenselves and doing their best.

I don't think it's so much the breakfast, but that the breakfast is given at breakfast club which means parents find it easier to get to work on time.

I pay about £30 a week for breakfast club at the moment, if it suddenly became free I'd be very happy with an extra £120 spare a month.

I think governments do this because it looks and sounds good. The reality is the children who need it most likely aren’t at school in time to have it. Cooked dinner would make a proper difference. Breakfast is the easiest and cheapest meal to provide.

I personally think budgets need to be spent on education, feeding your child is a parents job, and extra benefits are given to those on low incomes with children to help with the cost (housing element is separate). Offering childcare with breakfast that is chargeable but waived for low income working parents is a bonus but not for all kids, see also school meals, better quality food for low income families not food for all

I dislike this, as it tends to be offered early in the morning as a way to extend the school day. I strongly suspect its being pushed for by business lobbies, who detest wfh but have realised that they are stuck with a choice of:

• pay staff sky high wages to allow them to live in cities with shorter commutes
• return to 7 hour working days (many in london now want 7.5 or 8 which is bloody difficult around kids and commutes

All these offerings are not about ensuring children are fed decent food. The food on offer is always poor, because offering these schemes through schools is a very expensive way to provide food, with 4/5 of any funding going on admin, staffing, private provider profit etc.

These schemes are about forcing schools to provide ever longer hours so that parents have no excuse not to work 40 hour weeks.

As now a grandmother, the idea that someone is too idle to provide their child with a simple breakfast maddens me. I went without (or ate crusts) during hard times when my children were small because, as loving parents, they came first.

Some people may not be capable of getting their act together to get children up washed and dressed and feed them while still getting them to school on time.
Some people really struggle with organising daily tasks esp where there is a time constraint.
They become overwhelmed.
It's not always laziness.

The government should be encouraging wfh more.

• lower transport pollution
• lower costs for workers
• much more flexible labour pool and a competitive advantage/levelling up for workers in low cost areas where there are often fewer jobs
• keep more parents in the workforce without disadvantaging children with ever less time from their parents

Terrible idea.
Providing breakfast is the parents’ job. Don’t take this job away from them. Whatever next? Are schools going to start putting children to bed too?
By all means give the parents the breakfast cereal/ porridge oats/toast or vouchers to buy it, but breakfast should be around the breakfast table at home.

I think it's a good thing. Especially for families who have children in different schools that start at the same time in different places.

But then the support should be to help those people learn to cope and set better examples for their kids, not to raise a generation who expect ready made meals to simply be handed out by the state via schools.

You'd still need to pay for childcare, free food or not.

There are 3 teachers at my school and we are forced to volunteer to staff this every day for free.

Totally agree. Our school also now do toothbrushing for all nursery and reception children !

That’s terrible. What does the union say?

Clearly not written by a working single mother 😬

I have two children, one in nursery and one in breakfast club - they both (and me!) need to be up, washed, dressed and ready by 07:15 and they refuse to eat first thing when they wake up because they’re tired and groggy. Giving my children some toast at breakfast club is the difference between my 6 year old eating in the morning at all or not.

Also, just to be clear, even if they would eat in the first half hour of the day, there’s zero chance I’m in the kitchen cooking up scrambled eggs at 6am when I’m trying to shower and get three people up and ready for the day alone 😂

Universal benefits are better. End of story.

Give all the kids a free breakfast.

I suspect you are right, nursery from 9 months and breakfast clubs for all and I think it will mean more pressure on UC claimants

Breakfast around the breakfast table 😂 tell me you’re a SAHM without telling me your a SAHM…!