At the beginning of the year, the Department for Work and Pensions announced that it would be surveying how low-income families across the UK experience food insecurity (generally defined as the experience of hunger, the inability to secure food of sufficient quality and quantity to enable good health, and cutting down on food owing to a lack of money).

The decision follows a report from the Environmental Audit Committee, which found that nearly one in five UK children under the age of 15 lives in a home that cannot afford to put food on the table.

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These findings back up observations from teachers, an increasing number of whom are buying food for hungry pupils in an attempt to lessen the impact on their learning in the classroom.

Hunger has implications for a variety of functions, from energy levels and behaviour to decision-making and future planning. But do we know how food insecurity impacts learning specifically? 

There is certainly a link between diet and achievement in school. We all know how difficult it is to concentrate when we’re hungry, either because the discomfort is distracting or because we’re feeling tired and lethargic. 

Poor diet has been shown to be related to lower academic outcomes and even a slight drop in IQ scores. Just skipping breakfast has been found to make a difference in our ability to concentrate and take in new information.    

A new paper looks specifically at the relationship between food insecurity and learning in India. The research is the first of its kind, and analyses the test scores of 12-year-olds in India with reference to experiences of food insecurity in the home at age 5, 8 and 12 years.

The study found that 47 percent of those surveyed had experienced food insecurity at some point during the observation period, including skipping meals, eating less when needed and families not having enough money to buy food.

In addition, 18 percent of the wealthiest families in the study had also experienced food insecurity. 

These experiences were found to be related to lower academic achievement, including vocabulary, reading, maths, local language (in this case, Telugu) and English, in all age groups.

However, underachievement was related to both the developmental stage at which the food insecurity occurred and the subject area.

Early and chronic food insecurity appeared to be the most consistent predictor of poor cognitive skills at age 12, particularly reading and vocabulary development, while food insecurity in mid-childhood and early adolescence was associated with impaired ability in maths and English.

This means that areas such as reading and vocabulary can be disrupted by food insecurity in early life, implying that establishing foundational skills early on is very important.

Subjects like maths, where learning at one level builds directly upon learning at previous levels, are more likely to be disrupted by food insecurity at any time and may derail current and future learning. This is the case even for shorter periods of food insecurity. 

Global concern

This study looked at children in India, but research has found similar patterns in western industrialised societies. (A 2017 systematic review, for example, found food insecurity to be associated with behavioural, academic and emotional problems from infancy to adolescence.)

Elisabetta Aurino and her co-researchers offer a number of recommendations to help combat the negative academic impact of food insecurity.

These include breakfast clubs and take-home rations and improving the nutritional content of school meals.

They also suggest the strengthening of the overall quality of early years education, thus ensuring a strong head start to counter some of the negative effects.

Marc Smith is a chartered psychologist and teacher. He is the author of The Emotional Learner, and co-author with Jonathan Firth of Psychology in the Classroom. He tweets @marcxsmith