Project summaries

Breakfast clubs and their challenges

Background and purpose

This report discusses the state of development of breakfast clubs in the United Kingdom with the key aim of improving the state of information about a topical, but relatively under-researched, area of out-of-school provision. Specifically, it seeks to:

To describe what breakfast clubs ‘on the ground’ are like.
To examine why they were formed, how they operate and how many children use them.
To identify and analyse the problems that appear to be common to many clubs.
To discuss the opportunities and challenges for government and policy makers.

The report has been written for two audiences: first, those who are already involved with a breakfast club or are considering whether to become involved; and, second, policy makers responsible for services for children and their families.

The study on which the report is based included interviews with staff in a representative sample of 35 breakfast clubs, all of which served food, covering both urban and rural areas and including both established and newly created clubs. It also draws together information from government, academic research, and other surveys of breakfast club provision.

What is a breakfast club?

A breakfast club is an example of before-school provision, typically open for about one hour before school starts. Some are school-based whilst others use community resources. Some provide food whilst others do not. Learning support or childcare needs feature prominently in some clubs, whereas others are focused on promoting healthy eating. Such diversity can create considerable confusion about this type of provision – which may be one reason why little detailed information is currently available about such clubs.

General features of breakfast clubs

Although very diverse, there are some common features of most breakfast clubs. The original reasons for a club’s formation continue to have a lasting influence on its continuing focus, and a basic distinction can be drawn between clubs founded with children’s interests paramount - supporting their education; improving health and nutrition; teaching dental health; offering social opportunities - and those founded with needs of parents, especially for childcare, uppermost.

Predominant characteristics of the breakfast clubs surveyed include:

Most clubs use school-premises, serve only that school, and only operate during school terms.
Clubs are typically open for about 45 minutes to one hour, from about 8am.
Most school-based clubs are on a drop-in basis; most non-school-based require pre-booking.
Most clubs cater for primary age children, typically at the younger end of this age group.
Average daily attendance is typically between 10 and 15 children.
Toast/spreads and milk / hot drink usually served; sometimes also cereals, fruit and hot foods.
Most clubs are run by school staff (who are paid extra for it).

All types of breakfast clubs faced problems of financial viability and stability, even those able to charge relatively high fees, with both staff costs and staff retention being serious problems. Partly as a result, most non-school-based clubs sampled (and some school-based clubs) develop either alongside or following the starting up of an after-school, homework or holiday club.

Innovation and the role of Education Action Zones

The study found innovative examples of breakfast club, often arising from the efforts of an individual school or local community project’s attempt to tackle problems or concerns specific to the children they care for. However, the study also found a more wide-ranging and rapid process of development being driven by some of the Education Action Zones. Enquiries made to 25 first wave Education Action Zones revealed that 11 of them either had the creation of breakfast clubs as a part of their action plan or were using some of their resources to support existing clubs or those being developed by other organisations.

Current levels of provision

Estimating the number of breakfast clubs is difficult task. In particular, attempts to gather information from local education authorities about schools in their areas running breakfast clubs brought very limited responses and highlight the invisibility of such clubs. Despite these limitations, drawing together information from a range of sources, we estimate that there are between 400 and 600 breakfast clubs currently operating.

With an average attendance of 15 children per day, this implies that there are between 6,000 and 9,000 children attending a breakfast on a typical day. However, since only a few children use a breakfast club every day – most seem to attend a breakfast club say two or three times a week, depending on the working patterns of their parents and the availability of other relatives before school - the total number of children using a breakfast club at sometime will be much higher.

Our tentative suggestion is that breakfast clubs may now be serving between 18,000 and 27,000 children, around 0.5% of all primary school children. Furthermore, our research suggests that attendance at a breakfast club exerts a ‘ripple effect’ onto other children on the school, possibly in terms of a generally improved and calmer atmosphere at the start of the school day.

Meeting many needs: the findings of the research

Broadly speaking, breakfast clubs have developed to meet three main areas of need: health, education and childcare. Key findings of our research include:

Parental demands for before-school childcare were identified by nearly one third of the clubs as one of the main reasons why they had set up a breakfast club.
Children arriving at school having missed breakfast was reported in nearly two thirds of the interviews and was often the main reason behind the formation of school-based clubs.
Problems with the unsupervised play of children arriving early, before school opened, were raised by just over half of the interviewees from school-based clubs.

The wish to offer social support, build school cohesion and tackle bullying were significant themes in the interviews with school staff. Although a full scale evaluation of breakfast clubs was not part of this project, it was possible to form certain impressions about what was proving successful and what not. One point which many interviewees stressed in connection with evaluation is that it would rarely be wise to judge a club in isolation from the wider circumstances in which it was borne (for example, as part of a wider process of building up a positive school ethos).

Strengths and weaknesses

Main areas where breakfast clubs were felt by interviewees to have had a positive effect include:

Some overall improvements in attendance and punctuality.
Improved concentration in class and fewer incidents of disruptive behaviour.
Improved social cohesion and interaction amongst pupils.
Improved and more frequent parent and teacher dialogue.
A calmer start to the day, with noticeable spillover effect into the rest of the school day.

On the other hand, needs which breakfast clubs were felt to be failing to meet include:

There are continuing problems with children arriving early and being unsupervised in the playground at school, or missing breakfast, even where a breakfast club is operating.
Many of the children with severe problems with punctuality or attendance mostly fail to benefit from the introduction of a breakfast club.
‘Grazing’ behaviour on the way to school remains widespread, with risks of the children buying sweets and snacks with the money they carry for attending the breakfast club.

Long-term survival depends on how well the clubs are integrated into their local community, the extent to which clubs have attracted a wide partnership of external agencies’ support, and the burden of transport costs for rural based clubs.

Barriers to development and sustainability

The range of concerns expressed by those who participated in this study fell into two main categories: funding and staffing. Key findings regarding funding include:

Breakfast clubs in more deprived areas are highly dependent on a other sources of funding since it is unlikely that they will ever be able to charge enough to cover their costs.
Although many clubs had received start-up funds on the understanding that they would then raise funds themselves, a significant number had found raising money very time-consuming and difficult, with increasing resistance, it was felt, from charitable sources.
The emphasis on funding for new services means that many existing clubs are by default ineligible for many of the source of finances introduced under recent government initiatives.

As a result of the pressure of funding, some clubs had cut back on the fresh foods offered and tended to only offer popular foods which they knew the children would eat, thereby limiting the clubs’ capacity to promote a varied and healthy diet.

Staffing emerged as an area of widespread concern amongst breakfast club leaders:

Plans to use volunteers (possibly parents) had often come to nothing.
The benefit rules often make it unattractive for unemployed parents to work at the clubs.
The early start and the relatively short time involved make for unattractive working hours.

In practice, the best arrangement was for the breakfast club staff either to be responsible for other out-of-school provision or be employed in the school in some other capacity.

Finally, a number of respondents expressed concerns about the sheer pace of change and what they termed ‘initiative overload’. They had worries about the administrative burden being placed on them in terms of developing services, often running out-of-school provision themselves and

having to fund raise to keep the club going.

Challenges for policy makers

Our research tends to confirm the wisdom of allowing a bottom-up approach, relying on local initiatives designed to meet local needs. There are, however, still some areas where the development of breakfast clubs may not coincide with government objectives. In particular:

Promoting health and nutrition: Whether the aim of improving children’s health and nutrition - for health but also educational reasons - is in practice a sufficiently important element in many clubs, both in their setting up but also in their continued operation.
Meeting wider needs and problems with money: Whether the aim of combating social exclusion is being undermined in areas where many families are on low income and where clubs cannot realistically charge at the levels that would be required to cover their costs.
Regulation and inspection: Whether the complex arrangements for regulation and inspection are permitting clubs to operate to unduly different standards – and are allowing some clubs to remain ‘invisible’ and thus, not sufficiently monitored by external agencies.

The challenge policy makers face if breakfast clubs are really to help with what children eat in the morning is to find ways of lessening the pressure that almost all the clubs currently seem to face to reduce their expenditure on food as far as possible. There are three parts to this:

Finding ways of persuading those families who could pay for a breakfast that it is a good idea to do so.
Finding ways of providing subsidies to pay for the breakfast of those children whose families have difficulty paying for it.
Finding ways of getting clubs to give breakfast a higher priority.

Although these measures, combined with the Working Families Tax Credit, may be sufficient to promote social inclusion for the children of low income, working families, they will not be enough for families who are ineligible for these benefits. Whilst the overall amount of money potentially available from government initiatives to support breakfast clubs is not seen as a limitation, the fractured nature of the funding regime and the unavailability of ongoing funding are both problems. The challenges for policy makers are therefore:

Finding ways of providing sustainable funding to cover the non-food costs of breakfast clubs in areas of identified deprivation.
Encouraging the development of simpler and more efficient ways of applying for funds, perhaps using ‘umbrella’ organisations to take on this function for groups of breakfast clubs.
Identifying realistic financial models for breakfast clubs that would allow them a good chance of being viable over the longer term while also allowing diversity and flexibility in provision.

The final subject is that of regulation, where a joint DfEE and DH review is underway, with indicative plans to give OFSTED new responsibilities. We see two challenges here:

Ensuring that standards are not compromised, given the current rapid expansion in the number of breakfast clubs.
Encouraging OFSTED to develop an approach which is fully sensitive to matters of child care and child protection as well as children’s learning and educational needs.

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