Why thousands of children are going to school hungry in Yorkshire

Carmel McConnell has a goal - to ensure that there are no children in Yorkshire starting lessons too hungry to learn.

Carmel is founder of Magic Breakfast, a registered charity that provides health breakfasts to more than 23,500 UK children every school day - 2,600 of them life in Yorkshire.

It was while researching her first book ‘Change Activist’ in 200 that Carmel got the idea for Magic Breakfast.

“I interview some teachers in London who told me that many of their pupils arrived at school too hungry to learn and so they took food in for them,” she explains.

“I was really shocked to hear this was happening on the doorstep of a global financial centre like London. I thought if it is happening here then it must be happening up and down the country.”

Carmel, who used to live in Harehills, Leeds, started buying and delivering breakfast food to five schools in Hackney. This was in 2001, but as demand for her help continued to grow Carmel decided to take a couple of years off from her job in business, re-mortgaged her house, and founded Magic Breakfast in 2003 as the first stage in a global approach to give every hungry child a good breakfast as fuel for learning.

“It seemed such a simple thing and I thought naively that I just had to convince local authorities and schools, but it has turned out to be much bigger.” Magic Breakfast currently works with more than 400 school nationally and with 53 in Yorkshire.

But what worries Carmel is the fact that there has been a worrying rise in child hunger in the Yorkshire Region as witnessed by the number of schools on their waiting list - 45 - who have applied to the charity for urgent food aid.

“This means there are, at the very least, 2,200 children who are arriving at school in the Yorkshire Region too hungry to learn for whatever reason We already provide healthy breakfasts to children in 53 partner schools in Yorkshire, which equates to feeding 2,600 children each school day who were either hungry or malnourished when their schools applied to us for help. There have been studies that show that children who have breakfast do twice as well in school as those who don’t. It costs us just 22p a day thanks to the generosity of our partners such as the People’s Postcode Lottery who fund more than a million healthy breakfast a year.”

Yesterday Carmel visit Havercroft Academy where Magic Breakfast has been since November 2014.

The school’s Magic Breakfast provision has not only had a big impact on pupils’ ability to focus during morning lessons, but it has also led to a big improvement in attendance and “lates”, thus contributing to the success the Academy is enjoying today.

“We have to decide if we want a generation to fail due to something so simple as having a healthy breakfast,” says Carmel.