Free breakfast schemes in disadvantaged primary schools have mixed impacts

Summary

We study the impacts of free universal breakfast schemes operated in disadvantaged primary schools between 2006 and 2024 with the aim of informing the national roll-out of Free Breakfast Clubs in England.

We use school-level data on the availability of breakfast schemes in England by three major providers: Magic Breakfast, the Greggs Foundation, and the National School Breakfast Programme and link these data to population or nationally representative datasets on children’s or school-level characteristics and outcomes: National Pupil Database, National Child Measurement Programme, and Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS).

We use a staggered difference-in-difference design to compare changes in outcomes for earlier adopters with later adopters. This enables us to calculate the difference between observed outcomes for children exposed to a breakfast scheme, with a prediction for what would have happened had they not (yet) introduced the scheme. Our estimates are ‘intention-to-treat’ (ITT), reflecting the effect of universal free breakfast being available rather than the effect of individual take-up. See more detailed results and methodology in our full project report, 'Impact of school breakfast programmes in primary schools in England'.