Blackpool begins trial free school breakfast scheme
Around 12,000 Blackpool primary school pupils are this term able to benefit from a pilot scheme launched by the local authority that offers every four to 11-year-old in the town a free breakfast.
Pupils at all the town’s primary schools are now provided with a range of healthy options for breakfast including fruit, yoghurt, toast, bagels, cereal bars and juice as well as continuing to receive free milk at morning break time.
The £700,000 scheme will run as a pilot for three months until April and, Blackpool Council hopes, will be extended throughout the school year.
Council leader Simon Blackburn said: “The launch of this scheme is the culmination of a great deal of hard work to ensure that the children of Blackpool get the best possible start to their day and are able to maximise their ability to succeed in school.
“We hope that making sure young people are properly fed in the morning will help them to focus on learning and help teachers to do their job.
“There will be no discrimination between those families that can afford it and those that cannot, every pupil will be able to start their school day fed and ready to learn.
“It is really important that as many parents as possible take up this new service - it was save them cash every week that they can spend elsewhere in the local economy, and makes a huge collective effort to get our kids in school bright and early, and ready to learn.
"Our initial pilot covers free breakfasts and milk in primary schools but we would like to see this eventually extended to include secondary schools and universal free lunches.
“We need to create a generation of children who understand the importance of nutrition, who will then go on to provide that nutrition to their children.”
The pilot follows research in 2012 by the Children’s Society which revealed that half of UK teachers were seeing hungry children coming into school.
The report also found that, every day, more than half of the 2.2 million school children living in poverty in England miss out on a free school meal.