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10
Section One
Use of English
“A toxic combination of growing poverty, the rising cost of living and troubled families
with chaotic parenting mean innocent children are being denied the best start to the day
– and to their lives.
“This is unacceptable in modern Britain and must be
5
tackled now.”
Experts say school breakfast clubs are one way of filling the food gap and seven out of
ten teachers believe they have a positive impact on a child’s ability to learn.
Sue Kennedy, school business manager at Atherton St. George’s Church of England Pri-
mary School Manchester, launched a breakfast club eight years ago after one pupil ar-
rived at school every day at 7am without having any breakfast.
She said: “This was just one pupil out of 250, and so I wondered how many more pupils
had we got who came to school without having breakfast?
“When the breakfast club was launched we experienced a considerable improvement in
raising attainment and a reduction in lateness and pupil absence.”
But Government cutbacks have hit breakfast clubs hard with one in eight forced to close.
They are fighting for survival with donations from food companies, food banks, grants
and fundraising events helping to keep them open.
Sue said: “Funding is difficult in the present climate but I am determined to continue to
find avenues to source funding as without our breakfast club we fear that the excellent
progress and results that have been achieved over the past eight years will be unsustain-
able.”
In a bid to help schools like Sue’s, Kellogg’s has launched its Help Give a Child a Breakfast
campaign to feed two million school children in the country’s most deprived areas.
It will donate a morning meal to a child each time a breakfast club video on its www.
giveachildabreakfast.co.uk page is shared, tweeted or liked, or special packs of cereal are
bought from supermarkets.
Sue said: “You all may take your own breakfast for granted, but please remember that
there are children out there who arrive at school daily without having a breakfast.”
Activities:
1. Write a short summary of the excerpt (about 250 words)
2. Match the phrases in 1-10 with the phrases a-j to create a sentence.
1)
Around 8,370 schools across England see children…
2)
This week 2.4 children in every class will…
3)
Yet this is no Third World country – welcome to 21st century Britain
where over a quarter of teachers…
4)
In some cases, there may be parents struggling to make ends meet and
they could well be forced to…
5)
Many youngsters are left to fend for themselves in the mornings as their
mums and dads…
6)
Schools have been filling the food gap with breakfast clubs designed to
give the most vulnerable children the best start to the day with a proper
breakfast that will…