Breakfast club early adopters grant: 2024 to 2025 academic year
Guidance for schools and local authorities on funding for the breakfast club early adopter schools from April 2025.
Applies to England
Documents
Details
This guidance is for:
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local authorities
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school leaders
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school teachers
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governing bodies and their representatives
The government has committed to offering a free and universal breakfast club in every primary school. The Department for Education has selected schools to become early adopters through an expression of interest process. Early adopters will work with the department to understand barriers to delivery, shape plans for national rollout, and ensure schools across the country have good practice to draw on. They have been selected to ensure a wide range of representation across different school characteristics.
Conditions of grant
This guidance sets out the terms and conditions applied to the funding for eligible institutions that are taking part in the early adopters scheme.
Methodology
This guidance will help schools and local authorities understand how the grant is calculated for April 2025 to July 2025 and how it will be paid.
Payments and allocations
Payments were made in 2 phases:
- we published allocations for the fixed payment made at the end of April 2025 for local authorities and beginning of May 2025 for academies
- we published allocations in November for the second payment in arrears made in November 2025 for local authorities and December 2025 for academies - this second payment is or has been determined by actual pupil uptake and data collected from schools between May 2025 and June 2025
Further details
If early adopter schools have any questions about delivering their breakfast club, please reach out to us via the department’s Customer Help Portal.