Alexander Bowen: The evidence is irrefutable – Labour’s breakfast clubs will do more harm than good

Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

Why do you want to starve children? Why are you ontologically evil? That’s the kind of response you get more often than not if you say you oppose Labour’s free breakfast clubs policy.

It’s screechy and it’s unhelpful but, like it or not, it has a certain effectiveness; in delineating so clearly two camps – me the public benevolent and you the kid starver – it works wonders.

People in the “kid starver” camp have more often than not tried to respond with some variant of parental responsibility. But to do so is to play on the terms set by those with whom you disagree: is a position which is both easily malcharacterised and that fails to convince anyone whose priors do not already match. Besides, in a battle between ‘parental responsibility’ and ‘starving children’ the latter will always ultimately win.

You can oppose the policy effectively. But it means decamping from the emotional battle set by one side and responding to emotion with evidence. Fortunately, in that regard the evidence is quite firmly on one side: that Labour’s free breakfast clubs will not work. Let’s look at it.

The best research on the subject – that is research that is not produced by lobbying groups, even noble ones like Magic Breakfast – amounts essentially to a shrug as far as the policy’s success is concerned.

One experiment by the US Department of Agriculture tested two models of delivering free breakfasts – the breakfast club model Labour is proposing, and a breakfast-in-the-classroom modification – and found that neither model accomplished anything. Kids in breakfast clubs were only one percentage point more likely to actually eat breakfast, and consumed no more calories or nutrients than they would otherwise have done.

Two substitution effects, something of which politicians seem time and time again incapable of conceiving, were operating here. First, breakfast at school just ended up replacing breakfast at home. Second, where kids did eat more breakfast they just had less at lunch.

Naturally, as one would expect, given no more breakfast was consumed, the study found no impact on health, on food security, on behaviour, or no impact on test scores. Bridget Phillipson, though, is sure that it will make “such a big difference” and have a “huge impact on children’s education, their attainment and wellbeing.”

I should be clear here that this is a study that ran for, and followed up its data collection, for years. The fantastical claim that keeps being wheeled out (that for every £1 “invested” £50 will be returned) seems to have zero basis in reality – unless, of course, one supposes that the benefits of a breakfast only materialise a decade after you ate it.

It isn’t just this study that finds breakfast clubs do nothing either. New York City tried out free breakfast clubs in 2003 and their program found the same: no impact on maths or reading scores. In Wales? No impact on the amount of breakfast consumed.

Even the body the Government likes to cite to prove their policy will work – the Education Endowment Foundation – was forced to conclude it doesn’t. Their systematic review (that is, a study that collates other studies – 25 of them to be exact) found that: “The average impact of breakfast provision when aggregating all studies on attainment is null”.

Indeed the only study in the developed world to find an actual noticeable impact (and thus the one the Government likes to cite the most) is a randomised control trial from the early 2010s. Yet that randomised trial (meant to be the gold standard for research) ended up not actually being randomised, both because the researchers set bizarre exclusion criteria and, er, didn’t ever actually conduct a randomisation.

Even then, it didn’t stop the study from concluding – once again – that no more breakfast was actually consumed as a result of the clubs.

It should be said too that what noticeable impacts it did purport to find were only on non-objective measures. For the groups where actual objective data was used the study again found no effect, despite the government promising that just making breakfasts free will add “two months of educational attainment” to each pupil.

The policy not working needn’t kill the policy. There are good arguments to offer kids free breakfasts at school – but they are ideological and ethical, not evidenciary or objective. If Phillipson had stood up and said “we are social democrats and we want to do this because we believe it is the right thing to do”, then that would be fine.

It might be ideological, and it might make for ineffective government, but it is at least honest. Yet again, however, the Government has flipped “evidence-based policymaking” on its head and opted instead for policy-based evidence-making.

That would be one thing if schools were flush with cash. But in reality, Phillipson is putting schools in a position where they will have to proactively cut projects that do work (i.e. hiring teachers) to fund projects that don’t (breakfast clubs). There’s no such thing as a free lunch – or a free breakfast club.

Labour’s plan is to provide each school with just 60p per pupil per meal, a figure that nobody believes is achievable, not least Labour themselves, whose stats imply parents spend £2.10 per breakfast. There’s a reason school boss after school boss has expressed their concerns about it, talking about having to make £10,000 cuts to fund Labour’s “fully funded” policy.

Even the people behind the study just covered (and to whom, again, Phillipson constantly refers) have said that Labour’s breakfast club funding will force schools to cut the most important parts of their budgets.

Anyone who’s been following these sorts of stories closely will know this isn’t anything new. In London, Sadiq Khan pledged to “fully fund” universal free school meals whilst providing just £2.65, a figure that left schools to pick up the funding shortfall and has had councils having to spend hundreds of thousands to top up the “fully funded” program.

Again, what’s most striking here is just the dishonesty. It’s not just another case of doing social democracy and justifying it with fictitious returns, but of politicians trying to reap the political rewards of spending whilst shunting its real costs onto everyone else.