Magic Breakfast
Moderate
for Primary reading
Moderate
for Primary writing
Evaluated in the UK
Intervention description
Magic Breakfast is a scheme which provides free healthy breakfast food to schools with over 50% free school meal eligible pupils. The scheme is intended to improve children’s readiness for school by ensuring that they do not miss out on a healthy breakfast. Schools participating in the scheme run breakfast clubs before school hours, which also provide a chance for children to talk to their peers and school staff before lessons commence.
Magic Breakfast is a registered charity which operates the scheme in partnership with schools across England. The organisation meets the cost of food and delivery to the school, and works with the schools to support them in achieving quality kitemarks and making the breakfast clubs self-funding.
Evidence Summary
The Education Endowment Foundation ran a project in 2015/2016 investigating the effectiveness of Magic Breakfast, which found that it had a positive impact on maths, reading and writing in KS1, and reading in KS2.
The evaluation found a mean effect size of +0.10 for primary reading, +0.14 for primary writing and +0.12 for primary maths.
Moderate
for Primary reading
Moderate
for Primary writing
Moderate
for Primary maths
Key research
The Education Endowment Foundation findings suggest that it is not just eating breakfast that delivers improvements, but attending a breakfast club. This could be due to the content of the breakfast itself, or to other social or educational benefits of the club.
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/magic-breakfast/
Key stages
Targeted groups
Practices
Cost
£11.86 per pupil, per year