Magic Breakfast provides a vulnerable child with the necessary ‘fuel for learning’

Back to School

Magic Breakfast’s aim is to alleviate child hunger as  a barrier to education through the provision of healthy  breakfasts to vulnerable schoolchildren across the UK.

In the same week that schools re-opened for the new academic year, the National Foundation for Educational Research published some worrying research showing that children in England are three months behind in their studies after lockdown, with boys and poor pupils worst hit.

This learning gap was also highlighted in the YouGov survey that we published in July where 80% of teachers said that school closures will have negatively impacted their pupils’ educational attainment. According to the Food Foundation, 5 weeks into lockdown, 2 million children had already experienced food insecurity. Those children have now been out of school for five months.

Breakfast has never mattered more. As schools re-open, children will be arriving hungry and won’t be able to learn if their first meal of the day is lunch.  Over the summer holidays they were able to provide healthy breakfasts to almost 35,000 vulnerable children thanks to some fantastic support from big names such as Heinz, Arla, Morrisons and Amazon.

As the Autumn term begins, Magic Breakfast are offering a variety of methods to provide healthy breakfasts depending on what best suits their schools and their families. In some schools, breakfast is being moved into the classroom in order to keep the children in their ‘bubbles’, whilst others are asking to continue with home deliveries. Children are also being offered take-home breakfast packs to eat before school, or during a localised lockdown. School Partners are working closely with schools to enable them to find the best way to reach all pupils at risk of hunger.

Keep Breakfast Going!

At the start of the crisis period they were anticipating a funding gap of £500,000 for this financial year, through loss of income from the restaurant industry and corporate events.
Magic Breakfast launched their emergency ‘Keep Breakfast Going’ appeal, which reached their £1million target in mid-August. They are delighted to have received donations from a wide range of corporates and Trusts/Foundations, together with high-profile support from Russell Tovey and Dele Alli amongst others. 

Working to Close the Attainment Gap

Child hunger plays a critical role in this situation. A hungry child cannot concentrate, is more likely to be restless, unhappy, lethargic, distracted or disruptive at school, making them at risk of missing out on up to four hours of vital lesson time each morning. Each Magic Breakfast  that they deliver provides a vulnerable child with the necessary ‘fuel for learning’ so that they are ready to reach their full academic potential – helping to close the gap. This is essential and  echo the sentiments of the ‘Attainment Gap’ Report published by the Education Endowment Foundation in 2018 in viewing a student’s poor educational attainment due to poverty as a ‘personal and individual tragedy, the cumulative impact of which can lead to long-term, structural challenges – political, economic and social – for the nation as a whole’.