Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the role the National School Breakfast programme could play in helping children recover lost learning as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.

This Government wants pupils to be healthy and well nourished. We encourage pupils to adopt a healthy balanced diet and healthy life choices through school funding, legislation and guidance.

The Department is investing up to £38 million in the National School Breakfast Programme (NSBP). This funding is enabling up to 2,450 schools to set up or improve breakfast clubs in disadvantaged areas of the country. The programme is designed to support schools in making their breakfast clubs sustainable for the longer term.

The Department knows that breakfast clubs can bring a wide range of benefits for children. An evaluation by the Education Endowment Foundation found that supporting schools to run a free of charge, universal breakfast club before school delivered an average of 2 months’ additional progress for pupils in Key Stage 1. Schools with breakfast clubs also saw an improvement in pupil behaviour and attendance.

The Department’s protective measures guidance for providers of before or after school clubs, and other out-of-school settings during the COVID-19 outbreak has been updated to make clear that providers who run community activities, holiday clubs, breakfast or after-school clubs, tuition, and other out-of-school provision for children, are able to continue to open for both outdoor and indoor provision, provided they follow the protective measures set out by the Government in this guidance: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/protective-measures-for-holiday-or-after-school-clubs-and-other-out-of-school-settings-for-children-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak.

Parents and carers are only able to access settings for certain essential purposes. Providers should only offer indoor and outdoor face-to-face provision to:

1. vulnerable children and young people
2. other children, where the provision is:

• reasonably necessary to enable their parents and carers to work, search for work, undertake education or training, or attend a medical appointment or address a medical need, or attend a support group,
• being used by electively home educating parents as part of their arrangements for their child to receive a suitable full-time education,
• being used as part of their efforts to obtain a regulated qualification, meet the entry requirements for an education institution, or to undertake exams and assessments.

The Government is committed to helping children and young people make up education lost as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. The Department has invested £1.7 billion to give early years, schools and colleges support to help pupils get back on track, including additional funding for tutoring, early language support, and summer schools.

The Department has also appointed Sir Kevan Collins as Education Recovery Commissioner who will advise ministers on the approach for education recovery, with a particular focus on helping students catch up on education lost as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.