16th June 2020.

Magic Breakfast welcomes the Government's announcement this afternoon that children eligible for free school meals in term time in England will get a six-week voucher to help their families provide food for them during the summer holidays.                                                                                                                                                                                         
We welcome too the Department for Education's commitment to continuing to support breakfast for schools that are part of the National School Breakfast Programme over the summer.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
Magic Breakfast has been supporting Marcus Rashford’s call for free school meal provision to be extended over the summer - and is very grateful to him for shining a light on the urgent matter of child hunger in this country.  Hunger does not disappear over the holidays and, as the number of children experiencing food insecurity rises during COVID-19, we cannot sit back and watch the educational attainment gap grow during school closures.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
It has never been more important to tackle holiday hunger.  That is why Magic Breakfast has made the decision to extend our programmes over the holidays. We continued making breakfast food deliveries to schools over the Easter and May half term holidays and we will continue to do so over the summer.                                                                                                                                                                            
We hope that today’s news demonstrates that we can stop child hunger in this country for good.