Children who eat a healthy breakfast before starting the school day achieve higher academic results than pupils who do not, according to a study.
Public health experts at Cardiff University who carried out the research say their findings provide the strongest evidence yet of a direct and positive link between eating breakfast and educational attainment.
Their report, published in the journal Public Health Nutrition, suggests that the odds of achieving an above-average score in tests at the age of 11 were up to twice as high for pupils who ate breakfast, compared with those who did not.
There is already substantial research into the links between eating breakfast and measures of concentration and focus; this is the first to show a “meaningful” link between eating breakfast and concrete measures of academic attainment, the authors claim.
The Cardiff study, which tracked 5,000 nine- to 11-year-olds from more than 100 Welsh primary schools, adds to a growing body of evidence showing that effective interventions to improve pupils’ health is likely to improve their academic performance.
Hannah Littlecott, the lead author of the study, said: “While breakfast consumption has been consistently associated with general health outcomes and acute measures of concentration and cognitive function, evidence regarding links to concrete educational outcomes has until now been unclear.
“This study therefore offers the strongest evidence yet of links between aspects of what pupils eat and how well they do at school, which has significant implications for education and public health policy.
“For schools, dedicating time and resources towards improving child health can be seen as an unwelcome diversion from their core business of educating pupils, in part due to pressures that place the focus on solely driving up educational attainment,” said Littlecott of Cardiff University’s centre for the development and evaluation of complex interventions for public health improvement (DECIPher)
“But this resistance to the delivery of health improvement interventions overlooks the clear synergy between health and education. Clearly, embedding health improvements into the core business of the school might also deliver educational improvements as well.”
Schoolchildren who took part in the study were asked to list chronologically all the food and drink they had consumed over a period of just over 24 hours, from breakfast the day before to breakfast the day they made their food lists.
The children’s breakfast eating habits were later linked to their scores in key stage 2 teacher assessments (carried out six to 18 months after the questionnaire), which are used to measure children’s academic attainment at the end of primary schooling in Wales.
The research found that eating a good breakfast – made up of dairy, cereal, fruit and bread – could improve educational performance, while eating unhealthy items such as sweets and crisps for breakfast – which was reported by one in five children – had no positive impact on educational attainment.
Chris Bonell, professor of sociology and social policy at the University College London Institute of Education, said: “This study adds to a growing body of international evidence indicating that investing resources in effective interventions to improve young people’s health is also likely to improve their educational performance.
“Many schools throughout the UK now offer their pupils a breakfast. Ensuring that those young people most in need benefit from these schemes may represent an important mechanism for boosting the educational performance of young people throughout the UK.”
According to 2012 figures quoted in the report, almost half of schools in England already provide breakfast clubs for pupils, particularly in areas of deprivation, and in Wales there is a free breakfast initiative for primary schools.
Magic Breakfast, a charity providing free breakfasts to more than 22,000 children a day, said all children should have access to a healthy breakfast at the start of the school day.
Carmel McConnell, chief executive of Magic Breakfast, welcomed the report’s solid evidence that a healthy breakfast creates educational benefits. “This is exactly what our 460 school partners tell us every day, and with outcomes like this for such a small financial investment, why isn’t the UK doing more?” said McConnell.
“Specifically, why don’t we now choose to boost UK child educational attainment by expanding the Magic Breakfast model, through partnerships with government, funders and corporate partners?”
McConnell added: “We know it works, it’s scaleable, and with over half a million children arriving at school too hungry to learn, now is the time for funding this simple, cost-effective measure to narrow the attainment gap.”
Source:Healthy breakfasts fuel better academic results, says study