Last autumn, Labour outlined plans to launch new Free School Breakfast Clubs for all primary school children across England. The programme will be rolled out, with the first clubs starting this coming April. In all, 180,000 children including 67,000 children from the most deprived areas of England, will be the first to benefit from the first phase.
The government will give schools the money and resources they need to provide healthy breakfasts that follow the School Food Standards.
Two Cheltenham schools – Battledown Centre for Children and Families, and Belmont School – are to be in the first wave of 750 schools to start the clubs.
The fact that we have schools in this priority wave reminds us that despite being an overall prosperous town, there are areas of multiple deprivation where families are struggling with the cost-of-living crisis, and the daily worry of providing nourishing food as well as meeting all the other essential costs of family life.
In some cases, this lack of money has resulted in children going to school with little or no breakfast, despite parents perhaps forgoing meals for themselves to make their budgets stretch enough to feed their children.
This is unacceptable in modern Britain, and Labour is committed to changing it. We are determined to give every child the best start in life, regardless of background or family circumstances, and that means the best chance of succeeding in their education.
Breakfast clubs have already demonstrated that they can help boost children’s reading, writing, and maths progress by an average of two months; children start the day ready to learn, with hungry minds rather than hungry bellies. But they also provide an opportunity for school friends and classmates to enjoy activities such as reading and crafts during the 30-minute pre-school breakfast period.
This adds to the benefits for parents, who can drop their children off half an hour earlier at the start of the school day, which the government estimates could save them up to £450 each year while also possibly boosting their work options.
Breakfast clubs will play a key role in Labour’s strategy to tackle the levels of child poverty in England, which had increased significantly (from 3.6 million in 2010, to 4.3 million in 2024) under a succession of Tory governments.
Under the Tories, these clubs were available in just one in ten primary schools across England. Labour will make free breakfast clubs available to all primary children as part of our mission to break down the barriers to opportunity and help give every child the best chances in life.
Clive Harriss
Chair, Cheltenham Labour Party