Project summaries
This collection of essays presents and develops a number of important health, education and welfare policy issues which were raised in a seminar which the New Policy Institute, together with the Kid’s Clubs Network, organised in December 1998. The seminar explored the benefits, new opportunities and the difficulties which face one specific form of out of school provision - breakfast clubs for school age children.
In the last decade, there has been a considerable expansion in many types of out of school provision, both before and after school and also services which operate exclusively during school holiday periods. Breakfast clubs are an example of ‘before school provision’, where providing the meal of breakfast is a core part of the clubs’ operation, alongside the provision of a safe, adult-supervised environment.
Data from the Kid’s Clubs Network database suggests that, at the present time, there are over 700 breakfast projects of some kind operating in the UK. These projects have developed in many different ways: some clubs operate within schools, whilst others use premises such as church halls or local community centres. Some are for the exclusive use by pupils from one particular school whilst others support several schools. Many have been started by and are run by parents on a voluntary basis. Others have been developed by school staff, or by staff from charitable organisations; a number reflect initiatives by local education and health promotion departments and a few owe their origins to local business interests.
Breakfast clubs have attracted widespread interest in the 1990s because they can collectively meet: children’s health needs by providing a balanced meal at the beginning of the day; educational needs in terms of ensuring children start the school day on time, feeling well-nourished and settled; and the childcare needs of children and their families through the provision of a safe, supervised environment before school starts.
Furthermore, they may have a serious contribution to make in tackling a range of current areas of concern:
There are a number of government initiatives which may be helped and consolidated through the development of breakfast clubs provision. The National Healthy Schools Scheme is designed to integrate schools’ approaches to the healthy meals they offer their pupils together with their lessons about nutrition, cooking and food hygiene. The National Childcare Strategy will co-ordinate and fund a large expansion of out-of-school childcare. Furthermore, by providing a cross-departmental approach to meeting children’s needs and providing support for young children and their families, breakfast clubs complement the government’s Sure Start programme.
Breakfast clubs may have a key role to play in the ‘whole school approach to food and nutrition’ outlined in the 1998 DfEE consultation paper on school meals: Ingredients for Success. They may also provide one route towards tackling inequalities in health amongst children by improving access to healthy foods at reasonable prices. Tackling health inequalities is a stated aim of the current Government. It is highly relevant that both the Health Survey for England ’95-’97: Young People (1998) and the report by Sir Donald Acheson, the Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health (1998), highlight differences in children’s diet based on social class and income group.
Changes in the funding of school meals and the delegation of budgets set out in the 1998 DfEE consultation paper Fair Funding: Improving Delegation to Schools, actually provide the practical means through which new and innovative ways of providing food for the school population, including breakfast clubs, can be supported and developed. Furthermore, such developments may be able to utilise spare capacity in already existing school catering facilities and may, as such, be highly cost-effective.
Whose responsibility is it to ensure that our children are raised well, in terms of receiving a healthy balanced diet? Is the state or the family responsible for supporting children? If it is the state, should provision should be universal or targeted and means tested? Complex questions about parental responsibility are raised. For some children, there is no reason to suggest that breakfast provision should move from outside their family domain. For others, however, where there are concerns about the adequacy of their diet, in particular those children who frequently miss this important meal completely, then quite clearly they and their families would benefit from support of some kind.
There is also no conclusive agreement about the root causes of the poor diets experienced by many children in this country. Differing analyses of the causes throw up quite different policy solutions.
For example, if the underlying cause of children missing breakfast or eating the wrong sorts of foods is lack of money, then perhaps what is needed is adjustments to state benefit levels, especially for those households without work. Alternatively, the state could, in theory, provide subsidies for essential foodstuffs.
Or is the root problem a lack of knowledge of what constitutes a balanced diet? If so, this would imply a greatly increased role for education.
If the issue is more to do with geographical access to a good choice of reasonably priced foods, then an area-based policy might be more appropriate. This would involve the eradication of so called ‘food deserts’: those areas which lack even a small supermarket and where residents have to rely on expensive corner shops which sometimes do not stock any fresh foods. Alternatively, government attention could focus on improving public transport provision to ensure that all families can reach the shopping facilities they need.
Finally, if breakfast is such an important meal, should provision outside the home rely on local interests or should it be the target of a nationally led strategy and prescribed nutritional standards along the same lines as those being pursued for school lunches? Indeed, should the duty set out in Fair Funding with regard to school lunches, which requires schools "to provide free school meals to eligible pupils" be extended to cover breakfast?
This pamphlet focuses upon one possible form of support provided outside the family: breakfast clubs for school children.
The first paper presented in this pamphlet, by Dr. Wynnie Chan of the British Nutrition Foundation, discusses the nutritional needs of school children and the important contribution that breakfast can make to their diet.
Both these overall dietary needs and the role of breakfast in meeting these requirements clearly illustrate why the development of breakfast club provision might be a very welcome development in attempts to address current concerns about children’s diets, their health and development.
These health concerns relate to several key areas. First, at the most basic level, breakfast is a meal frequently missed completely by children. Last year, figures from Gardner Merchant, school caterers, indicate that 18% of the 15-16 year old girls surveyed, 12% of the boys of the same age, and 6% of all children aged 8-16, miss breakfast. Only 4% of socio-economic grades A and B have no breakfast whereas this doubles to 8% amongst socio-economic grades D and E. Completely missing a meal may reduce the chances that a child’s total daily intake of the essential nutrients needed for healthy growth and development will be adequate.
Second, there is widespread concern about the imbalance in many children’s diets, especially their over-reliance on ‘grazing’ on high fat and snack foods throughout the day instead of eating ‘proper’ meals. In her paper, Dr. Chan highlights the adverse health effects which may arise from this sort of diet.
Breakfast clubs may also help to develop healthy eating habits in childhood which, it is now widely accepted, positively influence adult eating patterns. In other words, breakfast clubs may bring both immediate and long-term benefits. In addition, there is a growing awareness of the susceptibility of children to be influenced by the advertising of unhealthy foods often targeted at this age group. Breakfast clubs may be one way of providing the knowledge and understanding of healthy eating needed to counteract such harmful advertising effects.
In the second paper, Professor Sally McGregor and Dr. Cornelius Ani from the Institute for Child Health examine the complex links between breakfast consumption and classroom behaviour, educational performance and school attendance.
The positive contribution breakfast can make to a child or young person’s educational performance has been a focus of intense research for some years now. Research has focused on the effects of eating breakfast on a child’s energy levels, their attention span, their creative thinking, their accuracy and skills in problem solving, and their levels of disruptive behaviour.
Given the current concerns about the numbers of children being excluded from school, and also reports of high and increasing rates of bullying within schools, obviously this is a very topical research area. Although the findings to date must be treated with caution since more UK based research is needed, there is a wealth of more anecdotal evidence which is quite unequivocal in its view that breakfast consumption brings clear educational benefits for both individual pupils and for the school as a whole.
By providing this meal in a club setting, there may be a number of important spin-offs: better socialisation between pupils of different ages; improved staff pupil relationships where school staff run and themselves use the breakfast club; and, in some situations, better parent-teacher dialogue where parents have an active role in the clubs’ operation. And whilst it sounds simplistic, the provision of a more calm, less pressured supportive environment for a period before the formal school day begins, may well be an important element in actually getting some children into school in the first place and from this, into a frame of mind receptive to teaching.
The third important argument for breakfast clubs provision – family support – is examined in the third and fourth papers. Maggie Walker, Head of Operations for the Kids’ Clubs Network, examines the need for before-school childcare and describes some of the new government initiatives in this area. This is followed by a paper by Dr. Elizabeth Dowler from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who discusses families and food poverty.
With an increasing number of mothers now engaged in paid employment outside the home – 1998 figures from the DfEE report an increase from 52% to 62% in ten years – and the government initiatives on getting lone parents into employment, before-school childcare provision is of great importance to a growing number of families. This need is clearly illustrated by the findings of the Kid’s Clubs Network in 1996, that almost a quarter of primary school age children go to and from school without an adult.
For many families, providing an adequate diet for their children is a major struggle, both in terms of the money needed and in being able to shop for fresh healthy foods locally. Sometimes women on low incomes skip meals in order to feed their children, and in doing so, may adversely affect their own health. This is point forcefully brought out by Dr. Dowler in her contribution. Children too may miss meals; in 1995, research by Barnardos indicated that one in nine children nation-wide regularly missed breakfast for economic reasons - many parents said simply that they could not afford to give their children an adequate breakfast.
The final essay is by Dr. J. Larry Brown, Director of the Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition Policy in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Brown discusses the important role of nutrition right from the moment of conception onward, and highlights the life-long effects of under nutrition which may result from children being "unable to benefit fully from schooling which, in turn, diminishes their potential as adults". He also summarises the current scientific research findings on the links between nutrition and cognitive development, and provides an evaluation of some of the key nutrition programmes for children in America. The latter is particularly important in providing a context in which we can evaluate current UK based initiatives.
Breakfast clubs present an opportunity to tackle some very significant health, education and childcare concerns about children in this country. However, important questions are also raised by this overview – and were much discussed at the seminar. For example, whilst there has been an expansion in the number of breakfast clubs, many areas of the country lack any provision. Sustaining breakfast clubs once the initial start-up efforts begin to wane and securing long-term funding are critical issues. And for hard-pressed schools already bombarded with a whole range of new requirements and standards to meet, it must be asked how welcome is yet another raft of initiatives?
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