Who could possibly argue against the provision of healthy breakfasts to children in great need of sustenance before the start of the school day, as Labour pledged to introduce at its party conference?

In fact, it would surely be guaranteed to be popular with almost every sector of society. But then, so it might be if someone promised a decent bus service for every village or a free swimming pool in every town. Great in theory, but not necessarily achievable.

Yet, offering a free breakfast sounds a lot more straightforward. Someone needs to pay for a few loaves of bread and a tub of vegetable spread, and you’re away. Well, not quite.

A cost exercise 

While it might be desirable, it’s important that we make sure the whole thing is practical before promising to every parent in the land that their local primary school will offer a free breakfast club.

For a start, schools come in a huge range of different sizes. Within a few miles of my fairly-typically-sized school, we have primaries ranging from nearly 700 pupils to barely 40. A rural primary with tiny numbers might find only one or two children even interested in a breakfast club: can it really be viable for them to provide a full service on the basis of the funding offered?

At the other end of the scale, plenty of larger schools have two, or even three or four, lunchtime sittings every day. Providing breakfast on a rota is hardly going to be feasible. And the costs will not be insubstantial.

It’s not clear how they’ll decide what to actually pass to schools; will we see a rallying cry to get children to attend on census day to mimic the current nonsense of the universal free school meals funding?

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimate £70 per eligible pupil per year. At 190 school days, that’s about 36 pence per day. Plenty to provide some bread and jam, but not so much when you also need to pay for someone to serve it while supervising children.

An adult on national minimum wage earns £9.50 per hour - somewhere comfortably over £11 with on-costs. At 36 pence per pupil, you need 30 pupils just to meet that cost - no jam included!

Waiting for staff

That, of course, is if you can find the staff.

Schools struggle to recruit midday meal staff, and the current climate isn’t making that any easier. There’s unlikely to be a surge of candidates for an hour-a-day role starting at 7.30am.

And it’s certainly not a desirable addition to the school day for many teaching assistants (particularly not at minimum wage prices).

In most schools, even for small clubs, it wouldn’t be desirable to have a lone member of staff, so now costs are recruitment challenges, which are on the rise already - and I don’t imagine there’s likely to be an army of supply breakfast club supervisors for when someone’s unwell.

Does that become the headteacher’s second job?

Let’s remove the need in the first place

Of course, there are plenty of people who already know the challenges of running viable before-school provision.

There’s lots of it around the country - usually provided as part of a wraparound care package that includes after-school provision. Not a hugely profitable industry, but thriving. So, what impact will free breakfast clubs have on them?

If schools are forced to provide the service for free, what impact might that have on existing provision? For some, it will be a case of transferring from one system to another, but the new funding isn’t likely to extend to the early morning provision that some settings offer. If the free offer only starts at 8.15am, does the 7.30am opening suddenly become a victim of its success? For some parents, they might end up in a worse position.

But anyway, don’t say any of that out loud: after all, what sort of villain would question the wisdom of serving food to hungry children?

Let’s just hope we also get policies that see fewer children desperate for food in the first place.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at East Preston Junior School, West Sussex.