• If all pupils who are completing KS1 at schools with high disadvantage in England received Magic Breakfast’s model of school breakfast provision it could generate long-term benefits of £2.7 billion.
• Providing the Magic Breakfast model of school breakfast provision for one year to pupils completing KS1 could generate long-term benefits to the economy of £9,200 per child.
• This intervention only costs £180 per child per year, which makes the benefit cost ratio 50:1.

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As the Government considers its future policy on school breakfast provision, Pro Bono Economics, in partnership with Magic Breakfast and Heinz, has conducted an analysis of the cost-effectiveness of the Magic Breakfast model of free school breakfast provision.

School breakfast provision, targeted at schools with a high proportion of disadvantaged children, is intended to tackle classroom hunger and drive-up academic performance by improving children’s energy, concentration, behaviour and overall readiness to learn.

This research looks at long-term economic benefits, drawing on established literature to examine what these academic impacts mean for reduced costs incurred for special educational needs, truancy and exclusions as well as improvements in earnings from employment up to the age of 60.

Key findings:

• Providing the Magic Breakfast model of school breakfast provision for one year to pupils completing Key Stage 1 could generate long-term benefits to the economy of around £9,200 per child. Approximately £4,000 of these benefits will go to Government through increased tax revenue and reduced public services costs.
• There are an estimated 298,000 pupils completing Key Stage 1 at schools with high levels of disadvantage[1] in England. If all of these pupils received the Magic Breakfast model of school breakfast provision it would generate total long-term economic benefits of around £2.7 billion.
• In Scotland there are 22,100 children in the equivalent year group at schools with high levels of disadvantage[2]. If all of these pupils received the Magic Breakfast model of school breakfast provision it could generate further long-term economic benefits of around £200 million.
• The cost of Magic Breakfast’s school breakfast provision is around £180 per pupil per year. As such breakfast provision for one year for those pupils completing Key Stage 1 has potential to generate net long-term benefits in excess of £9,000 per child.
• This means that every £1 spent on the programme could generate more than £50 in benefits, making it a highly cost-effective intervention.

This study adds to the growing evidence that the provision of food at school is a cost-effective way of improving academic attainment by demonstrating that the potential long-run benefits are likely to significantly out-weigh the short-term costs. As such, this strengthens the evidence that interventions such as those provided by Magic Breakfast represent excellent return on investment for children.

While the broad conclusions remain robust under a wide range of alternative assumptions, it remains subject to a number of important evidence gaps that should be filled over time. In particular, developing further evidence on the extent to which improvements in academic outcomes are sustained over time and the potential scale of additional benefits from exposure to Magic Breakfast’s support over a number of years is key to building a greater level of certainty around economic impacts going forwards.

Thank you to Jon Franklin, Toby Kenward, Jonathan Coller, Tomas Dillon and Nathaniel Greenwold for their work on this project.

[1] ‘Schools with high levels of disadvantage’ in England are defined as schools with at least 50% of pupils in Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI) Bands A-F.

[2] ‘Schools with high levels of disadvantage’ in Scotland are defined as schools with at least 55% of pupils in Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) quantiles 1-2.

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