What impact would Labour’s pledge for free breakfast clubs have on schools?

The party’s plans include a commitment to ensure there are “free breakfast clubs in every primary school to drive up attendance and standards”.

Whilst this is very positive, there will certainly be challenges for schools in implementing it.  

Ensuring that children arrive at school on time having had breakfast is very important to schools and learning, and may certainly help make the improvements that Labour are seeking in attendance and standards.  

A breakfast club may mean that schools need to open earlier with a caretaker or keyholder needing to arrive at school earlier to open up. This may then mean increased staffing costs, and schools may also need to employ additional staff to provide this service or ask existing staff if they can increase their hours.  Therefore, this commitment would need to be fully funded by Labour.

Employing staff to work in schools has become an increasingly difficult task and these roles will be for limited hours at quite an unsociable time of the day.  Hourly rates for these roles will be fairly low and staff performing these roles will be subject to additional pre-employment checks related to disqualification under the Childcare Act 2006. This commitment to safeguarding cannot be overlooked.

As breakfast will be provided, staff that are handling and storing food will need to have Level 2 Food Safety and Hygiene certificates and also be alive to allergies that the children may have. So this adds another level of complexity when recruiting to these roles.

Schools may wish for teachers to be involved with these breakfast clubs and they could be used to supervise support staff or for any aspect of breakfast club time that requires a teachers’ professional skills and judgement. This may be challenging when schools are already under pressure to reduce the workload of teachers.