Breakfast clubs are great news for parents - but they're not a magic fix

Yahoo

28-02-2025

In 2015, Anna Whitehouse founded Mother Pukka. Drawing on her experience as a working mother, Anna launched the Flex Appeal campaign to challenge the outdated and inflexible working practices that disproportionately affect women, particularly those with young children.
The government has announced 750 schools will participate in a free breakfast club pilot scheme, allowing parents to drop children off 30 minutes before school starts, knowing they will start the day with a proper breakfast.
This isn't a silver bullet. It's not a fix-all. And it isn't about grabbing a free slice of toast. But breakfast school clubs are being rolled out in the UK and it is - on some level - good news for many parents. Especially mothers who continue in 2025 to carry the bulk of childcare.
For too long, parents have juggled school drop offs with mission-impossible commutes, but there is often no other way - unless you fork out more cold, hard cash, in a cost-of-living crisis. This pilot - landing in April this year across 750 schools - takes away the breakfast club fee and saves parents up to £450 per year on morning childcare. Of course, it's not free in the sense that it's taxpayer's money. But it's support in the right direction.
It will enable parents to get back to work, parents who want to work, who have been holding off, papering over the before-and-after-school cracks. It might sound really simple - but that 30 mins can be the difference between making it to work on time or not. Research by the Centre for Progressive Policy estimates that there are 1.7 million mothers who want to do more paid work but can't, due to childcare issues. Those extra hours are worth in the region of £23bn in economic output.
I know only too well how hard it is to navigate an inflexible job around being a parent. When I asked to flex my hours to enable me to make my job work around pickup and dropping off my kids, you'd have been mistaken for thinking I was asking for someone to hand-feed me grapes at my desk all day. 'Sorry, Anna, if we make allowances for you, it will open up the floodgates for more parents wanting the same.' My boss and I couldn't see eye to eye on this. Why wouldn't you 'open the floodgates' was all I could think, why wouldn't you let every person manage their time around their own responsibilities? But to my boss, this was an alien concept.
While it shouldn't necessarily be the case that we need to introduce schemes like this to placate inflexible workplaces, the reality is that not everybody has flexible working today. If anything, businesses are regressing not progressing. Each week we're seeing more discussion and more dictation from bosses to 'get back to the office' as if play time is over, and now it's time to take work seriously again. The pandemic really showed the power of flex, working from home and working around families kept companies alive during the COVID pandemic, and it also enabled companies to realise that breaking free from the 9-5 works. When you enable people to be in charge of their time and location, nothing falls over, in fact, productivity increases.
This is something we are continuing to campaign for - to flip the narrative - why can't we have flexible working as the default? Why does it have to be the exception rather than the rule? The reality is these breakfast clubs will open up the doors for parents, they will enable parents to breathe, to regroup and to bring more flexibility into their school mornings. They will also be a lifesaver for shift workers, NHS workers, doctors whose days don't fit into the 9-6pm cardboard cut out work day. But they are, of course, papering over the cracks of an inflexible system that is still setting mothers up to fail.
This new scheme is, rightly, aiming to reach pupils living in the most disadvantaged communities. For many children, this isn't about whether they choose to eat at home or eat at school - it's whether they are able to eat at all.
According to the UK government, there were 7.2 million people living in poverty in 2023, a heartbreaking 11% of the population. Many families living in crisis are make heart-wrenching choices that no parent should have to make for their children, often forced to choose heating over eating.
A new report from the charity Buttle, which supports families living in crisis, has found that 53% of families are unable to afford enough food and basic nutrition. The impact of living in poverty on educational outcomes are huge - poor living conditions are having a direct effect on children's learning, with many not being able to concentrate or stay awake in class.
These bleak realities are the things that you don't see unless you look behind closed doors. But schemes like this will be a helping hand to children for need this additional support, to help them to be ready for the day with food in their bellies. The research on the positive impact on their education has shown to be lasting, and also it will be a helping hand to parents to take away the stigma of needing support in that early part of the day.
Making school breakfast available and accessible to every child and parent who needs it will change the script for many families, and will hopefully set the stage for more continued support for mothers, and all parents to enable everyone who wants to work and raise a family to be able to.
But time will tell how the pilot rolls out; if 30 minutes is enough, if it's nutritious enough and funded well enough.
And whether it's enough for the hungry minds - and stomachs - of the next generation.
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