News that a school in the province is starting to offer free breakfasts to all children is part of a trend growing in popularity across schools in the western world to help alleviate the hardships felt by the worldwide cost of living crisis.

At face value, it’s a laudable, community-centred gesture, but let’s scratch beneath the surface because I’m sure as night follows day, school principals’ tongues are wagging and wondering if it’s something they should be doing in their own area.

It could well happen locally, so is it a cheap PR trick, or is it a genuine offer of help? You decide.

A dollop of cynicism to add here is that head teachers are the only people in the teaching profession that are paid according to the amount of children in their schools.

The more children a school has, the more pounds in their pockets. With this in mind, we as a society must always have an eye on the reasons behind why schools do what they do beyond delivering the curriculum, because the more warm and fluffy a school appears, a question could arise: are they creating this atmosphere to attract more 11-year-olds through their doors?

Anyhow, back to the case in point – the breakfasts.

As you can imagine, it’s not an ‘Ulster fry’ or anything like that, but a standard child’s breakfast of tea or hot chocolate, cereal, and toast with toppings.

That’s fair enough; getting kids out of bed in the morning is a challenge enough, so anything that stops the hunger pangs isn’t going to be a bad thing.

I like the hot chocolate thing too, might as well give them diabetes as well!

Joking aside, as you can imagine, there is a direct and proven relationship between hunger and achievement, and on one level, better results, even by a grade or two in a couple of subjects, really helps the tightly congested ‘league tables’.

This benefits all, of course; the students looking for A-Level or university options, jobs, teacher satisfaction and of course, the head teacher’s CV.

I say ‘league tables’ loosely as there has been no publication of Year 12 and Year 14 results in Northern Ireland since 2018/19 as the Minister of Education has agreed that the Summary of Annual Examination Results process should be suspended and not collected for accountability or inspection purposes.

There are, of course, informal Brownie points on offer between local schools where prospectuses will proudly declare their glowing stats, and a quick collection of these unnecessarily expensive colour booklets will give you a quick notional ‘league table’ of your own.

Meanwhile, back at the breakfast bar, the next thing to note is that it’s being offered one day a week, so depending on your year group, you go in early on your allocated day and enjoy the free breakfast.

With just under 1,000 children in the school in question, you’re thinking, will breakfasts have upwards of 160 or so kids per allocated day on offer?

Not a chance – how many parents are going to fancy doing multiple school runs every day if they have children dotted throughout the school years; equally, how will this fit in with bus runs?

For every child you have in a different year group, it’s an extra day’s school run or walk, another child to get into action in the morning at a different time and chase out the door.

Why don’t they arrange the breakfast offer by surname or family or carer grouping?

The cynic in me says that by doing it this way, they know fewer people will take up the offer, yet they can still shout from the rafters about how they’re helping the local community.

But the optimist in me says they’ve done their homework, and this is where they see the need most. 

I’m left with more questions than answers on this one, I’m afraid ...

However, if schools here in our neck of the woods decided to do the same, what would be the cost implications?

In the words of that great philosopher – well, pop singer, Jessie J –  “Everybody’s got a price”, so in this case, what is it?

The money has to come from somewhere, so with dwindling school resources, the four obvious sources are sponsorship, grant aid or other such funding, school amenity budgets, and main school budgets.

If such schemes come from the first two, then well done for raising that, but if any schools, not just the one in question, tried the other two funding options – especially the last one – then somewhere down the line there’s a direct, tangible cost. 

This could mean hard-pressed teachers having to photocopy yet more resources as departmental budgets for books would be affected, or simply the meagre slim pickings that are already on offer in schools would become even trimmer.

This could mean infrastructure or equipment not being fixed or replaced or, more perniciously, staff who are at their limit for time being asked to cover yet more classes, because the school doesn’t have the budget to pay for similar levels of substitute cover.

This in turn means fewer days for those supply teachers who aren’t getting work, which in turn, puts pressure on the amount of bread they can put on their own table.

Even the question of who supervises these children when they’re having their breakfast is worth raising.

I don’t see much slack in the system, so while teachers are doing this, in the long run they’re not helping your children pass exams.

Furthermore, teachers’ time budgets must be agreed before the start of the school year, and current union action by the largest teachers’ union means that any new initiatives are currently part of their action, short of strike action.

The result? Big gestures from schools must be taken with a pinch of (low-sodium) salt. There’s always a cost, and always a back story.

This doesn’t mean that such initiatives shouldn’t happen, nor do they have a cynical underbelly; no, they just need to be well thought out and costed, both in time and money, and not sound like they’re milking the PR ticket.

As the saying almost goes: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch ... or breakfast”.