The Impact of Breakfast Clubs on Pupil Attendance and Punctuality

of the English education system since 1906, the concept of breakfast provision via schools was until recently given little attention across the United Kingdom. Consequently, the provision of a meal in UK schools has almost exclusively been restricted to lunch. In contrast to the slow development of interest in school breakfast provision in the United Kingdom, other countries have been providing morning meal programmes for a relatively long time and more research has been undertaken abroad evaluating the impact of school breakfast provision. The following section will discuss research completed to date in more detail. However, it was largely positive research findings from abroad that began to be noticed in this country. As a result the provision of breakfast for school pupils started to attract interest in the 1990s. Further impetus towards the establishment of breakfast programmes came through accumulating evidence linking the material deprivation suffered by children with ill health. North American school nutrition programmes consider poverty to be a key issue in missing breakfast (Shaw, 1998). The Labour government in Britain also believes that there is a link between poverty, no breakfast and poor health. However, as Dowler (1999) notes, ‘there has been no large-scale survey of food and low income in the UK’ and therefore the chain between poverty, no breakfast and poor health is largely a theoretical supposition. Further research is needed in this area, although other data (Department of Health, 1989) have demonstrated that pupils who receive free school meals have a lower vitamin and mineral intake than their peers. In July 2000 – following a twenty-year gap since the 1980 Education Act scrapped them – minimum nutritional standards for school meals were reintroduced. By 1999, Street claimed, there were ‘over 700 breakfast projects of some kind operating in the UK’. The nature of the breakfast projects reflected the almost experimental context in which they were being established. A diverse range of provision was emerging, based in schools, church halls and other community centres.