'My school cannot afford free breakfast club'
GettyA head teacher has criticised the government's free breakfast club scheme for being too expensive for her school to run.
Barbara Middleton, of Shiremoor Primary School in Newcastle, said she had so far declined to take up the government's free breakfast club offer due to the financial and logistical challenges involved.
She said one of her key issues with the programme was that schools were forced to allocate at least 30 minutes before lessons began for the breakfast. "The funding being paid doesn't afford me the employees that I would need to be able to run that safely," said Middleton.
But the Department for Education (DfE) said many schools had told it the scheme was "fair and workable".
There are 145 schools in north-east England now enrolled in the breakfast programme.
Schools receive £25 a day plus £1 per pupil taking part from the government.
These funds should be used to pay for both the food and staffing costs involved.
GoogleHead teacher Craig Brown, of Dean Bank Primary and Nursery School in Ferryhill, has signed up to the scheme and will begin offering the free club later this month.
He said he estimated the school would receive about £10,000 from the government over the next academic year for the scheme.
But he said this would not cover the school's total costs of running the programme.
Nevertheless, he said the school was taking part because the money being offered was a significant upgrade on its previous breakfast club offer, which he said had relied on funding from a charitable foundation.
'Free childcare?'
Middleton's school currently offers bagels to each child every morning, in part through funding it receives through the charity Magic Breakfast.
Children receive this bagel even if they are late to school, she said.
But the government's breakfast programme mandates that all schools hold the club for at least 30 minutes before lessons begin.
Middleton said this would not only be difficult to staff but was also logistically difficult for her school, which would be forced to accommodate more than 300 children in one hall.
Letting children eat their breakfasts in class before lessons would not be feasible, she said, as this was when teachers prepared for the day ahead.
"Give us the funding to offer the breakfast club but give us flexibility," she said.
"Is the aim that all children are fed before school or is it that the government wants to increase free childcare?"
Brown, however, said he found the government offer more appealing because he was already staffing the school to look after children before lessons began.
He also said making it mandatory to offer the breakfast clubs for 30 minutes was positive for other reasons.
"The social environment for me is one of the big things," he said.
"I know a lot of families that don't have a dining table and don't have the opportunity to sit around and talk to the children.
"So actually if we can offer that as a school multiple times a day – not just at lunch time – then it's a winner."
The DfE said it had listened to earlier feedback about the scheme and it now offered more funding to schools than it had previously.
"An average primary school with 50% take-up will receive nearly £30,000 a year – around 18 times more than the previous National School Breakfast Programme," a spokesperson said.
