Magic Breakfast was so pleased see to our corporate partnerships approach to providing school breakfast featured in Gordon Brown’s, Partnership to End Poverty report, and also his article in The Guardian article this week.
Gordon Brown’s report profiles our founder, Carmel McConnell MBE, who started dropping off supermarket bought breakfast items to her local East London schools to address the morning hunger that headteachers told her was such a barrier to learning for their children. As Carmel scaled up the organisation, we forged corporate partnerships with Heinz and Quaker, which Gordon Brown highlights in his report.
20 years on, Magic Breakfast is still so proud to be working in partnership Quaker and Kraft Heinz, as well as other major companies, such as Arla and Warburtons, to provide freely available, hunger focused, stigma free breakfast to over 200,000 children every day at school.
Gordon Brown’s report comes at a crucial time with the latest stats showing an increase in child poverty to 4.3 million and a general election looming.
Magic Breakfast is very pleased to be part of the End Child Poverty coalition’s campaigning efforts, most recently against the two child benefit limit, which Gordon Brown also highlights in his report.
We hope that all political parties will commit to expand access to free school breakfast in their manifestos for the General Election, as a key element in comprehensive, holistic strategies to end child poverty.
There is a wealth of evidence – which our corporate partners are very aware of – showing the benefits of school breakfast – particularly for children living in poverty - in terms of attendance, attainment, and health and well-being. Vitally, for an election that will focus on the economy, research shows a £50 return on every £1 invested in school breakfast at Key Stage 1 level.
We hope these benefits will be front of mind of manifesto writers in the political parties, and we are so grateful to Gordon Brown for keeping school breakfast high on the political and policy agenda.
