Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department has made an assessment on the number of breakfast clubs open in Barking constituency.

The department is committed to continuing support for school breakfast clubs, and we are investing up to £24 million to continue our national programme until the end of the summer term in 2023. This funding will support up to 2,500 schools in disadvantaged areas, meaning that thousands of children from low-income families will be offered free nutritious breakfasts to better support their attainment, wellbeing, and readiness to learn.

Schools are eligible for the programme if they have 40% or more pupils within bands A-F of the IDACI scale, a nationally recognised indicator of need.

The enrolment process is still underway for schools that wish to sign up to the programme. As of May 2022, over 2,000 schools had signed up. The department does not hold data on school eligibility and food orders at a constituency level, and there are currently no plans to undertake an assessment per local authority. We will continue to work with our supplier, Family Action, to monitor the data on a national level and consider suitable opportunities to share more information on the programme in due course.