Free breakfast club for all primary school kids

[ladykale]

So the Labour government is planning to offer free breakfast clubs for all children at all state schools regardless of area.

Given that these are often run independently from schools themselves, if you have a state school in very close proximity to a private school, should private school parents be allowed to use this service, and if not, why not?

My DD’s school at one point had children eating breakfast in the classroom during bell work.

So who is serving the food and drink for breakfast? Who's tidying away? Who's cleaning the dishes? Who is ordering the food and drinking and ensuring it gets to the right classes at the right time every day?

Yes which makes the ops question even more ludicrous. I mean how the fuck will they cater for thousands and thousands. That anyone can just front up. I mean the idea of just doing it for the school alone will mean they need to be providing for over a thousand meals in many cases, then the staff to do it, provide the food, serve it, clean up.

who is paying for this, another magic money tree?

Why can't the private school have its own one? What a silly question!

So suck it up and pay.
Or go to the state school 🤷🏻‍♀️

Essentially this is a free childcare time for parents who are busy with commute to work. Useful logistically but provides zero educational benefits in practice. State run schools mostly focus on keeping kids off the streets, education comes secondary. Private schools are different and their BCs are used as debate arena.

We'll do a trade - your kids come in for half a stale bagel and we'll send all of ours over to use the pool, sports pitches, computer rooms, musical instruments and other facilities. Before school or after school, doesn't matter, your choice. Of course, you'll need to provide the staff to supervise and make sure they don't break anything, including themselves, and of course all their parents will need to be able to just wander in without any way of checking if they're supposed to be in school at all/collect them and mill about the site in the meantime - but that'll be fine, won't it?

Such a wast of money.

I think it’s a great idea,but the sheer cost of it, and the logistical scale of it is enormous. Wouldn’t we be better investing in the facilities, the books, the tools needed, before providing everyone with a free brekkie and child care. That’s the shit you do with everything else is sorted.

the state system is creaking at the joints. And this is where they focus first?

This sounds like the latest incarnation of the voucher scheme, and I'd be really surprised if it went anywhere.

State schools are not allowed to charge for any part of the education they offer (though they can solicit voluntary contributions, but cannot treat any pupil differently because te parents do/don't pay)

Would not work as how would they get to their own school?!

You can stop saying Labour Government now. We can hear the eye rolling.
It's just the government.

The whole thing is a ridiculous idea, but if it happens and the private school doesn’t have its own free provision, in principle yes, a private school child should be able to access free wraparound care the same as every other child.

How is this going to work in schools where there aren’t enough children to make running a club viable? If it’s popular, where is an entire school full of children going to go before the start of school? Are we expecting teachers to sacrifice the child free time they get in their classrooms to prepare for the day?

This. Genuinely don’t understand this post 😂

Around here they are all run by the school itself, never heard of it being done separately

Every breakfast club my kids went to was run by the school so clearly only open to pupils of the school.
Clearly you opt in to private school and you opt out of state school.

If you go to a private school you have chosen to opt of of state services.

So buy your own breakfast. 😳

And yes teachers do very much get pulled into wrap around care in some schools, either as short notice cover or just dealing with issues as they arise. We really struggle to recruit for our clubs - we found it is not popular as an addition to TA hours as a pp suggested.

What do they eat at these breakfasy clubs?

White or wholemeal? Sugary cereal or porridge oats? Etc

How is this going to work in schools where there aren’t enough children to make running a club viable? If it’s popular, where is an entire school full of children going to go before the start of school

there is no school where there aren’t enough kids, by very definition. If there’s a school. There’s kids, they just resource if for the amount, the issue is just at rhe other end, schools with hundreds, or thousands of pupils , how do you resource that. Everyone will be going for free food and childcare.

Some schools don’t have kitchens as have school lunches brought over from another school/provider, so assume what they can offer will be limited

I think wales has this anyway

At our local primary school it's

Toast
Bagels
Pancakes
Choice cereals (corn flakes, rice crispiest, bran flakes, weetabix)
Fruit
Fruit juice and milk
Yogurt

Run by the council and costs £5.75 a session.

And they all have massive waiting lists

We have this in Wales. Schools have breakfast clubs that you pay for but they’re free from a certain time (my kids school is free from 8.15) with free breakfast. It’s staffed by TAs and you book on the school app as you would after school club. It would be nothing to do with a private school (not that there’s one in my town) and nor should it.

we also have free milk up to year 2 and free lunches for all primary age kids.

@Roseyjane but every pupil won’t need/want to go to breakfast club. I wouldn’t have needed to use it when DS was at Primary (although I am sure he would quite liked to have breakfast at home and then another one at school). Not everyone takes up the universal infant free school meals as they don’t like what is on offer. So you may end up having to pay staff that you are not actually getting funding for (same as for everything else then!)

But you could also be in the position that you have a huge take up. Many school halls can’t accommodate whole school at the same time when eating, and do staggered lunches, so how would they manage breakfasts

Breakfast clubs are for the kids at that school not any random kid who fancies going. It will come out of the funding the school receives for each child on the role