Free breakfast clubs: take-up by region of schools taking part in the early adopter scheme
Published 2 September 2025
Applies to England
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Take-up of free breakfast clubs by region
From the summer term of 2025, 750 schools were funded to deliver a free breakfast club as part of the early adopter scheme. Table 1 shows the number of children who took up the free breakfast club offer in 729 early adopter schools, compiled from the number of school-level returns submitted for one week. The underlying data was collected between June and July 2025.
Table 1: Uptake of breakfast clubs by region
| Region | Total take-up of breakfast clubs during schools’ data collection week | Estimated take-up since the start of the 2024 to 2025 summer term |
|---|---|---|
| Yorkshire and the Humber | 24,980 | 289,720 |
| East of England | 17,540 | 203,510 |
| South West | 22,140 | 256,850 |
| North West | 33,800 | 392,020 |
| London | 27,250 | 316,070 |
| South East | 23,710 | 275,070 |
| East Midlands | 23,000 | 266,800 |
| North East | 16,540 | 191,840 |
| West Midlands | 35,830 | 415,640 |
| England | 224,790 | 2,607,520 |
It is possible to estimate the overall take-up across the summer term of the breakfast club programme. This is calculated by combining data on the take-up in a given week with the number of days that the clubs have been active.
For example, as of the end of the 2024 to 2025 academic year, clubs have been active for 58 days. By multiplying one week’s worth of data by a factor of 11.6 (58 days divided by 5 days), we can calculate the overall take-up by region. However, varying term durations across schools introduce uncertainty with this figure.
Limitations
This data collection represents one week in the school term. DfE has not yet received data returns from all schools. Therefore, this data is not fully representative of all schools in the programme.
We have approximated weekly take-up by summing daily breakfast club attendance figures recorded across the 5-day data collection. As a result, the figures in table 1 should not be interpreted to represent the number of unique pupils attending a breakfast club, as some pupils will have attended the club multiple times throughout the week and may be counted more than once. Varying summer term lengths also limit the certainty of the full-term take-up estimates in table 1.