It's 8 o'clock on a bright morning at the end of the summer term just gone and at Kingsmead primary school in Hackney the staff are preparing to perform one of their core tasks. Not teaching their pupils to add up. Not teaching them how to read, or all the cool stuff about Egyptian mummies and the pharaohs. They are preparing to give them breakfast. "You can't have good learning if the children are not ready to learn," says head teacher Louise Nichols, and she knows what she's talking about. She knows that without their daily breakfast club, dozens of the children in her inner city school would be coming to school hungry. And she knows that because it's what used to happen.
Kingsmead is in an area that is among the 4% most deprived in Britain. Around a third of the children come because their parents' working hours make it difficult for them to get breakfast at home. But many more come because there simply isn't breakfast to be had at home. "There's a lot of chaotic households, and some very large families," Nichols says, in the pause before breakfast starts. "A lot of our children will be getting themselves up from a very young age and not necessarily seeing an adult. We give some of them alarm clocks to help them get up." And then there are those adults who simply don't have the money to feed their kids. "The community is definitely getting poorer," she says. There are more and more hungry children needing feeding, more and more breakfasts to be served.
As the new school year gets under way, Louise Nichols's experience is being confirmed by data from across the country. In a recent survey from the Guardian Teacher Network, 83% of teachers said they were seeing pupils who were coming to school hungry; 55% said up to a quarter of their kids were turning up having not eaten enough. Almost 50% admitted they had bought food with their own money to give to pupils. Teachers talk about children fainting in class or in the playground; about children whose behaviour is so erratic they have considered excluding them, until they discovered they were simply hungry. They talk about anxious or fretful children who can't put a name to what is troubling them, because they are too hungry to focus on the problem.
What's more, as changes to the benefits rules kick in and the recession deepens, organisations involved with breakfast clubs are saying the problems are only worsening, that demand is rising. It is estimated that there have been as many as 20,000 such clubs nationwide, but those supported by local authorities are now seeing their funding cut, and just as that demand is rising many are being forced to close. Last spring the Royal College of GPs, the National Association of Head Teachers and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health all called on the government to give the 1.3 million children in England already entitled to free school meals, free breakfasts too, as they are in Wales. It's not going to happen; ministers have said they have no plans to pursue the proposals. Teachers may give a damn about children going to school hungry. Charities may care. But apparently Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, does not.
The breakfast club at Kingsmead is run with the support of the charity Magic Breakfast, which is involved with around 200 schools' clubs around Britain, and helps supply bagels, cereals and juices as well as technical support. On a busy day Kingsmead can be feeding half the school's 250 kids. Today is busy enough, with herds of small people from a vast range of ethnic backgrounds – the area is one of the most diverse in the country – crowding around the fold-out tables in a bright, airy hall just off the reception area.
"What we do here is really important," says Hilda McWilliams, one of the teaching assistants who helps run the club, as she butters up toasted bagels by the dozen. "Bagels are the most popular, though we also do beans every other day and in the winter there's porridge with maple syrup which they like. Though we keep control of the maple syrup." I ask a bunch of eight-year-old girls why they come, as they shove hunks of jam-smeared bagel into their mouth. "They give you food for free," says one, with a grin. "I come for fun," says another. They talk a lot about the social side, about meeting their friends, about the football club which they all appear to be a part of.
The staff do not play down the socialising element. It's important. But they also emphasise the role that getting their children fed has played in the school's success. They have recently had an outstanding Ofsted report, and are outperforming many of their neighbours with more privileged intakes. It's a story reported across schools offering free breakfasts. According to figures gathered by Magic Breakfast, 88% say it has led to improved attendance and attainment, and 93% say it has led to better concentration in class. "We used to have a registration process for the breakfast club," Nichols says, "and we charged a £1 a day for it." That, she says, was putting lots of parents off. Once they could stop charging, the children who really needed it started coming. But, she says, the service is vulnerable. "Which is worrying because it's something we seriously need."
It's a similar story over at Keyworth primary in Kennington, south London, another outstanding school in an area of high deprivation , which also gets support from Magic Breakfast. It runs its club from a long airy Nissen-style hut to one side of the grounds. Again I talk to the children about why they come. "It's too busy at my house," says one nine year old. "Because the cereal has run out," says another, simply. "I come because my mum doesn't really make my breakfast for me," says a third. I ask gently why that is. He shrugs. "Because there's no food." It is the cold logic of the child.
I ask Claire Eastwood, deputy head teacher of Keyworth, whether she thinks people know how serious the problem is. "No," she says bluntly. "I don't think people understand that kids don't get breakfast for many different reasons." Does she ever find herself being judgmental about what can look like a simple failure of parenting? "You can't be judgmental because you simply don't know what circumstances they find themselves in." (It is a sentiment echoed by Louise Nichols at Kingsmead. "I'm Hackney born and bred," Nichols says. "I know the difficulties these parents face." In any case, she says, once you start judging the parents you start labelling the child, and they are what matters. "They are the ones who are suffering, for whatever reason.")
In the last three months of the school year, Keyworth has seen a "massive increase" in the number of children coming in for the club. It's down to changes in benefit rules forcing unemployed parents who were able to be there for their children out on to work experience early in the morning. It's also down to a simple lack of hard cash. According to Eastwood, "It's a fact of life in an inner city school." What's more, we were talking at the end of the summer term. The safety net of school was about to be removed for many of these children for six weeks. "That's true. When the holidays come, breakfast club closes and it concerns me greatly, on the level of food intake, socialisation, everything. When they come back after the summer you always see a deterioration." Carmel McConnell, the founder and chief executive of Magic Breakfast, first got involved with the issue around the turn of the millennium, when she was visiting schools to conduct research for a book on how business could engage with local communities. "Headteachers were telling me they could have brilliant communities but too many of their pupils were putting their hand up and saying they were hungry," she says. "That was shocking to me. Britain's GDP had tripled, we had a trillion-pound financial services sector and yet in Hackney we had children who were hungry." She shakes her head at the memory of it. "I couldn't do very much. I went round supermarkets and bought a load of food with my own money and dropped it off at five schools."
McConnell, who describes herself as a veteran of social protest movements of the 80s – Greenham Common and the miners' strike – decided something more serious had to be done. She remortgaged her house and gave herself two years to set up a more robust organisation. "Suddenly I had 25 schools on my books. I lobbied the Labour government about it. I saw every single education minister and they all said it was being dealt with. It wasn't."
By 2008 she realised, in her own words, that "the cavalry wasn't coming". Government wasn't going to deal with the issue. Having worked on corporate social responsibility issues with some big companies, including BT, she now describes herself as "fluent in capitalism". She approached the makers of Quaker Oats and Tropicana juices and convinced them to deliver £600,000 worth of food and drink a year (both companies supply their own products, though this is not the case for all supporters of breakfast clubs: Kellogg's give grants instead). "And that's how we've made it work. Until now we haven't had any public grants. It's all been done through partnerships with business. Those companies that want to get involved for PR reasons can sling their hook."
I ask if it makes her cross that an organisation such as Magic Breakfast has to exist. "Of course," she says. "It's madness that I have to do this. This is pure social failure. You can't have hungry children missing out on their education. And it's getting worse. We used to have 20 or 30 schools on our waiting list. Now we have 130. The forms they fill in would make you weep. Children coming into school listless because they're hungry. We're also seeing more midweek hunger as pay packets and benefits run out at home."
Other organisations working in the field report similar issues. The charity FareShare, which redistributes food from supermarkets and manufacturers which might otherwise go to waste, says that breakfast clubs used to make up only 4% of the groups receiving its food. Now it's nearly 20%. A number of companies, including Kellogg's and Greggs, help support clubs across the country. The educational charity ContinYou, which administers grants in partnership with Kellogg's and provides training and support for clubs, says it too is seeing massive increases in demand. "We also have anecdotal evidence of more kids coming to school hungry," says the chief executive Karin Woodley. Sadly, the outlook is bleak. Research into the impact of current benefits changes, by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), forecasts another 800,000 will be pushed into poverty by 2020. And poverty means hunger. "So far we've only had 15% of the benefits cut," says Alison Garnham, chief executive of the CPAG, "and we're already seeing the impact. We've got the vast majority still to come and that's very worrying."
There are glimmers of hope. Kellogg's is running a campaign to raise around £250,000 to help support clubs. Magic Breakfast is to get a six-figure sum from Boris Johnson's Mayor's Fund, to support 50 schools in London for the next three years. But it's a long way from McConnell's ambitious plan to raise £13m, with which she believes she could provide the 1,000 poorest schools with self-sustaining breakfast clubs. And it's even further away from central government support.
A spokesman for the Department of Education acknowledged their importance. "Breakfast clubs can improve children's attendance, concentration, motivation and promote healthy eating habits." However, they said it was up to schools to decide how to spend the funds they were given; with local authorities seeing their budgets brutally squeezed, the clubs are often the first in line for cuts. According to the DoE, the so-called "pupil premium", aimed at the most disadvantaged children, will double, but that's not until 2014/15, which may be far too little far too late. Even a report into school food, commissioned by Michael Gove from Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, the founders of the Leon healthy fast-food chain, will not be delivered until sometime next year. Dimbleby and Vincent have made it clear they recognise the importance of breakfast. "We don't need to wait for a detailed double-blind trial to prove that children who are hungry will find it hard to concentrate," says Dimbleby. But again, even if their recommendations are acted upon – and that is a very big if, given the track record of the education department under Gove – any change will still be measured in years.
In the meantime it is being left to dedicated people such as Carmel McConnell and Magic Breakfast, to big brands, to teaching assistants and staff across the country who are prepared to get up early enough to make sure that all of Britain's children have had enough to eat in the morning to prepare them for school. Because without them, too many would go hungry. It would be shocking at any time. But in 21st-century Britain that is nothing short of a scandal.
