As children across the North East prepare to return to school for the new academic year, families are once again getting ready for the daily routine of school uniforms, packed lunches, homework, clubs and, for many, the increasingly difficult challenge of making ends meet.
Will the breakfast club ambition work?
For some families, the cost of getting children ready for school is simply part of the normal household budget. For others, it is another pressure in a household already having to make difficult choices about food, heating, rent and other essentials. Which is why the government’s ambition to provide free breakfast clubs in primary schools is one that I, and the governing body of Byker Primary School, strongly support. Ensuring that no child starts the school day hungry is surely one of the most straightforward ways we can help children to be ready to learn and reduce some of the pressures on families.
But as we prepare to start another school year, there is a question which deserves to be asked: will the way we are delivering this ambition actually work for the children and families who need it most?
That is not an abstract question for us at Byker. As Chair of Governors, I have been involved in looking carefully at what the government’s new breakfast club programme will mean for our school, our staff, our children and our families, and our conclusion is not that the ambition is wrong but that the national model does not necessarily fit every school or every community.
The new programme has now moved from its early-adopter phase towards national rollout and has been placed on a statutory footing through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026. The legislation requires breakfast club provision to be available free of charge to qualifying primary pupils and defines that provision as breakfast together with at least 30 minutes of childcare immediately before the start of the first school session.
That distinction matters because breakfast and breakfast childcare are not necessarily the same thing.
The previous National School Breakfast Programme
Under the previous National School Breakfast Programme, Byker was able to purchase shared-price bagels and make breakfast food available universally across the school. It was a simple arrangement, but there was considerable value in that simplicity because every child could access a breakfast item regardless of whether they attended a formal breakfast club.
A child who arrived hungry could have something to eat without having to arrive at school early, while families who did not want or need additional before-school childcare could still have the reassurance that their child would be able to access breakfast. It provided a discreet safety net which did not require a child or family to identify themselves as needing additional support.
Consultation and the new model
Our own parental consultation showed that a number of parents did not want their children spending additional time in school by attending a breakfast club, but nevertheless valued having breakfast food available at school. For some families, knowing that their child could have breakfast at school removed both a financial and practical pressure from the morning, while for others the childcare element simply was not something they needed.
The new programme changes that model fundamentally because breakfast is now delivered through a breakfast-club model which combines the meal with at least 30 minutes of before-school childcare. The statutory provision is free and must be available to qualifying pupils, but it is nevertheless a different proposition from simply making breakfast food available to children as part of the normal school morning.
At a school such as Byker, with approximately 396 pupils, that creates an obvious question about reach. If 100 children attend the new breakfast club, 296 children would not be attending that funded provision, and our concern is what happens to the universal breakfast-food offer which previously enabled those children to access breakfast without attending a breakfast club.
That is not an argument against breakfast clubs. There are many children and families for whom they will be enormously valuable, particularly where parents need to get to work or where additional childcare is part of the problem they are trying to solve. It is an argument for recognising that the objective should be to make sure children have access to breakfast, rather than assuming that every child who needs breakfast also needs an additional period of school-based childcare.
And this is where the reality of starting a new school year becomes important.
National policy can sometimes make implementation sound deceptively straightforward: provide the funding, open the doors, employ the staff and provide the food. Yet anyone who has actually run a school knows that the reality is considerably more complicated, particularly in a school serving children with a range of additional and complex needs.
Skilled staff are needed
Byker has significant SEND requirements, which means that breakfast provision cannot simply be treated as a catering exercise. We need appropriately skilled staff who understand the children they are supporting and who can supervise them safely. We currently have only six members of staff who could potentially undertake this work, while those staff are employed on 37.5-hour contracts, and recruiting people with the right skills to undertake a 30-minute shift each morning is extremely challenging.
We have therefore tested the external market rather than simply assuming that the school should find a way to make the programme work. Eight independent out-of-school providers were approached to explore whether they could deliver the breakfast club, but all eight declined to tender or support the initiative. The feedback was consistent: in their assessment, the available funding does not provide sufficient resource to cover the staffing requirements alongside the cost of food.
I think that evidence deserves to be taken seriously because this is not simply a school saying that it would prefer to operate differently. Providers whose business is delivering out-of-school provision have looked at the model and concluded that they cannot make it financially viable.
Funding and physical constraints
It is important, of course, to acknowledge that the government has provided more than the £1 per pupil figure alone. Under the current funding methodology, mainstream schools receive £25 per day towards fixed costs, together with £1 per pupil per day attending the club, and there is also a one-off £1,000 start-up grant for schools joining the programme. That is welcome, but from the perspective of a school like Byker the question remains whether that funding reflects the real cost of delivering the programme in a particular building, with a particular pupil population and particular SEND and safeguarding requirements.
Then there is the physical reality of the school itself.
Byker does not have unlimited non-classroom space which can simply be converted into a breakfast club, particularly if attendance rises significantly. Once numbers move above around 100 children, providing an appropriate eating and activity environment becomes increasingly difficult, because we have to feed children safely, supervise them properly, provide an activity offer and then transition them into the school day.
Our kitchen creates another constraint because it is already being used for lunchtime meal preparation by around 8am and does not have sufficient capacity to prepare, manage and store food safely for a potentially large breakfast cohort. Once numbers rise beyond approximately 70 pupils, this becomes a significant operational challenge, alongside the training, safeguarding and safer-eating arrangements we need at Byker to support our particular cohort of children safely.
These are the sorts of practical considerations which can easily disappear from a national policy announcement, but which become very real when the school gates open and a new academic year begins.
Designing and delivering public policy
None of this is an argument for doing less for children; in fact, it is precisely the opposite, because if we are serious about putting children first then we have to make sure that the way in which a programme is delivered reflects the needs of the children it is intended to support. The £1,000 start-up grant is welcome and will help with some of the initial costs, but it does not address every ongoing cost associated with staffing, food, supervision, space and infrastructure, and those costs come at a time when schools are already dealing with rising employment costs, falling pupil numbers and wider pressures on their budgets.
There is a wider lesson here which goes beyond breakfast clubs and gets to the heart of how we design and deliver public policy.
We have become increasingly accustomed to national programmes being designed around a standard model and then expecting schools, councils and other public services to make that model work in their own circumstances. While there are obvious advantages to consistency, there are also occasions when local circumstances are sufficiently different that flexibility is not a luxury but a prerequisite for success.
A school in a large building with extensive dining space, a different pupil profile and fewer complex SEND requirements will have a very different experience from an inner-city school such as Byker, just as a family which needs before-school childcare will have different needs from a family which simply wants to know that their child can access breakfast when they arrive at school. Treating those needs as though they are identical may make the policy easier to administer, but it does not necessarily make it better policy, particularly if the consequence is that a school ends up spending more to provide breakfast to fewer children.
This is why I believe the government should be prepared to listen to schools and families about what works locally. Where a breakfast club is the right answer, it should be properly funded, including recognising the additional costs associated with SEND and safeguarding; where a school has a successful complementary breakfast-food arrangement, there should be scope to consider how that can be retained alongside the new programme; and where physical infrastructure is inadequate, that needs to be recognised rather than simply becoming another pressure which schools are expected to absorb.
North East Mayoral Combined Authority
There is also a wider North East dimension to this which deserves consideration.
The North East Mayoral Combined Authority has rightly made tackling child poverty a major regional priority and has established a Child Poverty Reduction Unit to coordinate action across the region, alongside a wider Child Poverty Action Plan. That makes breakfast provision a natural part of the regional conversation because if we are serious about the ambition to eradicate child poverty across the North East, then the way in which children access something as basic as breakfast cannot simply be regarded as a matter for individual schools and the Department for Education.
The Combined Authority cannot rewrite the government’s funding model, but it does have a convening role and an increasingly important responsibility for bringing together local government, education, health, communities and other partners around the challenges facing children and families. This is precisely the sort of issue where that role could add real value, not by taking responsibility away from schools but by listening to what is happening across the region and using that evidence to influence national policy.
So as the new school year begins, perhaps the Mayoral Authority should undertake a short regional review of the new breakfast club programme, listening directly to schools and families about how it is working in practice, particularly in communities with high levels of child poverty and in schools with significant SEND needs or physical constraints. That would allow the North East to understand whether the national model is actually reaching the children it is intended to support, identify where the funding or delivery model is creating problems, and use that evidence to make a stronger case to Government for greater flexibility where local circumstances demand it.
This would not require the Combined Authority to take over responsibility for breakfast clubs, nor would it be an attempt to second-guess individual schools. It would simply be an opportunity to do what good regional government should do: listen to what is happening on the ground, identify where national policy is working and where it is not, and use the collective voice of the North East to argue for better outcomes.
That seems entirely consistent with the region’s ambition to eradicate child poverty. If we want to reduce the pressures on families, improve children’s readiness to learn and ensure that no child starts the school day hungry, then we should be interested in the outcome rather than becoming overly attached to one particular delivery mechanism, because the success of the policy should ultimately be measured by whether more children are getting the breakfast they need rather than simply by how many breakfast clubs have been established.
Listening and putting children first
That is ultimately the point we are making at Byker. We are not asking government to abandon its ambition; we are asking it to listen to the experience of those delivering it and to be prepared to change the mechanism if it is getting in the way of the outcome.
There is a tendency in public policy to believe that a national solution must necessarily be better than a local one, but good public policy should ultimately be judged by whether it improves people’s lives rather than by how neatly it fits into a national framework.
At Byker, we know what putting children first means. It means listening to our families, understanding the needs of our children, recognising the pressures on our staff and making the best use of the resources available to us, while being prepared to tell Government when a policy designed with the best of intentions is not quite working as intended on the ground.
And as the school gates open again for another academic year, perhaps that is the simplest test of all: are we reaching the children who need breakfast most?
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