Blackpool’s free school breakfast pilot scheme launched today, ensuring that thousands of children will not start school hungry.

Pupils at all Blackpool primary schools will be provided with a range of healthy options for breakfast including fruit, yoghurt, toast, bagels, cereal bars and juice as well as continuing to receive free milk at morning break time.

The scheme will run as a pilot for three months and, it is hoped, will be extended throughout the school year.

Cllr Simon Blackburn, Leader of Blackpool Council, said: "The launch of this scheme is the culmination of a great deal of hard work to ensure that the children of Blackpool get the best possible start to their day and are able to maximise their ability to succeed in school.

"We hope that making sure young people are properly fed in the morning will help them to focus on learning and help teachers to do their job.

"There will be no discrimination between those families that can afford it and those that cannot, every pupil will be able to start their school day fed and ready to learn. It is really important that as many parents as possible take up this new service - it will save them cash every week that they can spend elsewhere in the local economy, and makes a huge collective effort to get our kids in school bright and early, and ready to learn.

"The initial pilot covers free breakfasts and milk in primary schools but we would like to see this eventually extended to include secondary schools and universal free lunches. We need to create a generation of children who understand the importance of nutrition, who will then go on to provide that nutrition to their children."

The majority of Blackpool primary schools will be providing free breakfasts from today.

Other schools will begin to provide free breakfasts by, at the latest, the start of the second half of the spring term.

(GK)