01 June 2017
Breakfast On The Menu
Is breakfast really the answer?
By Lynda Goetz
The answer to what, you may well ask? A fair question. Firstly and most importantly, is it the answer to plugging a hole in the Conservative’s education budget? Secondly, is a free breakfast for all primary school children a reasonable substitute for Nick Clegg’s universal free lunch for infants (between four and seven)? Thirdly, and perhaps also topically, is it one of the answers to our obesity epidemic? The answer to all three questions is almost certainly ‘No’, but this may also depend on how you define breakfast, or more exactly what you expect to eat for breakfast.
Breakfast, as the first meal of a new day, has long been considered a reasonably important meal. It is, literally, the meal with which we break our fast – not having had anything to eat since the previous evening. In this country we are famous for the ‘Full English’, although I doubt there are many who start every day with eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, beans and toast or whatever constitutes your idea of the traditional English breakfast. This is a meal reserved for high days and holidays; for those occasions perhaps when someone else is doing the cooking. For many, as they rush off to school or work, breakfast may consist of nothing more than a cup of tea, or maybe a piece of toast, a bowl of cereal of some description or perhaps a yoghurt and a piece of fruit. In Germany and Portugal, breakfast is often a platter of cold meats and cheese with some bread; in France and Italy, coffee with some sort of sweet bread (brioche) or a pastry; in Spain it may be toast with oil and garlic; in Japan, a traditional breakfast would be miso soup, steamed rice and pickled vegetables (although these days they are just as likely to have toast and coffee). Some of these options are clearly healthier than others; they may also be more or less expensive.
So what is Mrs May, since she seems to be the Conservative party these days, planning to spend per child on breakfast? How does this compare with the amount currently spent on providing lunch, and what is the take-up likely to be? This seems to be where the arguments begin. According to the Conservative manifesto, the cost of providing breakfast to all primary school children will be only a tenth of the £600 million currently spent on lunches. (That, for those of you with Diane Abbott’s problems, is £60 million). According to Schoolsweek.co.uk, critics have calculated that this costing would make the amount spent on breakfast per child no more than 6.8p if all 4.62 million eligible children were to take up the offer. We must assume therefore that the Conservative’s calculations are based on the fact that they are not expecting 100% take-up. Even without that, calculations become a little sticky and there has already been some back-tracking on the figures.
As I lay no claim to any sort of mathematical or statistical skills, nor to have any access to teams of analysts such as are available to those on BBC 4’s More or Less (which interestingly did a study in 2013 at the time of the introduction of free lunches), I do not propose to bandy about too many statistics, but it does seem clear that the benefits of both school lunches and/or breakfasts are not only difficult to quantify, but also difficult to cost in the face of unknown take-up. If there were a 25% take-up, then on the costings quoted in Schoolsweek that would still put the spend per child at less than the 25p cost of a nutritious meal quoted by Aisling Kirwan, the founding director of The Grub Club. The other problem with breakfast, rather than lunch, is the fact that schools (and kitchens) will need to be opened earlier and of course staffed. These costs do not seem to have been accounted for. Magic Breakfast, which provides breakfasts to disadvantaged and vulnerable children across the UK, relies on its charitable status and corporate sponsors/partners. The government presumably is not anticipating such help.
Apart from the apparent miscalculations, the questions raised by More or Less four years ago still remain unanswered. Whilst at the poorest end of society, some good may well be achieved by providing children with a nutritious meal which they would not otherwise have had (enabling them to concentrate on lessons), is this really going to make a significant overall difference when all children are taken into account? Better food may possibly help attainment, but pilot studies on lunches were undertaken in disadvantaged areas and overall ‘results were unclear’. Apart from breakfast clubs like Magic Breakfast, again focused on disadvantaged children, no pilot studies have been carried out this time around. So will providing ‘breakfasts for all’ significantly help address academic attainment in primary schools? This may well depend on what is actually provided and that of course will be dependent on the finances.
It is arguable that it is in fact the job of parents to feed their children before school. Many parents would agree with this and would not want this aspect of their role to be handed over to schools. But how important is breakfast really? Last year a study at the University of Bath suggested that the importance of breakfast had perhaps been overstated and could have been the result of marketing. Dr James Betts, a senior lecturer in nutrition, was astonished to find that there was very little solid evidence to back up the beliefs. His research found, for example, that contrary to popular belief (even amongst many GPs), skipping breakfast did not affect fat levels or make people gain more weight. However, the research was not focused on children, nor on how eating breakfast affected thinking skills.
Jeremy Corbyn’s solution is to extend free school lunches to all primary school children (i.e. up to Key Stage 2) at a cost apparently of £1.5 billion, but his claims that the policy had been proven to boost attainment and tackle obesity were not backed by local councils (who had maybe listened to More or Less or Dr Betts) and it is unclear where he plans to get the money from for such a project were he to get the chance to implement it. The Lib Dems have tried to brand Mrs May as the ‘lunch snatcher’, attempting to bring back memories of Maggie Thatcher as ‘the milk snatcher’. This is unlikely to stick, as it has nothing of the playground rhyming that made the original so memorable. Universal breakfasts for primary school children may not be an answer to obesity, educational attainment or filling a deficit in the education budget, but free lunches for the first three years of primary school is a relatively recent universal benefit and, probably quite rightly, one that with restricted funds available cannot really be justified. The mistake is to try to both replace and extend in a gesture of socialist expansiveness, rather than spending what money there is on those who need it. Although they may have an initial appeal, universal benefits are an expensive money pit – rather like the Tar Baby, they frequently have a way of making a sticky situation worse.
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