The most important meal of the day

6000 children across the UK are fed at school every morning by the charity Magic Breakfast, but many more go hungry.As you take another sip of coffee and ponder a third slice of toast, consider this: there are primary schools in Britain where a quarter of all children arrive having eaten no breakfast. Not a crumb. This is not because these pupils are 'not really breakfast people', as some strange adults claim to be. It's because – in this civilised nation of ours, the seventh richest in the world – they come from homes where the food supply is erratic. What's more, the problem is getting worse. Magic Breakfast is a charity providing free morning meals to 200 of the poorest schools in the country. The waiting-list of schools hoping to receive consignments of free wholegrain bagels, cereals, juice, fruit and porridge from the charity has quintupled in less than a year (from 20 to 100). Already 6,000 children are being fed by Magic Breakfast. But the charity – which recently won a Big Society Award from the Prime Minister – estimates that the true number of primary-age British children who struggle through the morning hungry is about 700,000. Many people doubt that there is real hunger in Britain. 'Look at all the obese toddlers!' they say, or, 'Why don't these people buy a Value loaf in Tesco for 47p?' But Alan Mak, the president of Magic Breakfast, has seen the horrors of child malnutrition at first hand in schools from Tower Hamlets to Manchester. 'We come across children with scurvy and rickets,' he tells me. 'It's Dickensian!' The benefits of giving these children a decent breakfast are immediate. It may take three or four weeks for their bodies to get back in sync, but the very first bagel often gives them enough energy to concentrate through the morning's lessons, where previously they might have dozed or acted up.Isn't it the parents' job to give a child breakfast? Carmel McConnell, the charity's founder, points out that there are many reasons why they might fail to do so. Some parents work badly paid shifts and may be absent at breakfast time. Some lack the skills to rustle up even a basic meal. In many cases the problem is dire poverty: there is not enough food in the house or not the right kind. Magic Breakfast sees children who start the day with sugary doughnuts or fried chicken wings, leaving them almost as ill-equipped for school as no breakfast at all. Whatever the cause, the spectre of child hunger in our midst should be a matter of national urgency. McConnell says, 'If I give a hungry child a bowl of porridge and a glass of juice and as a result they enjoy their lessons, I can't imagine anyone opposing it.' She argues that it is an extremely 'good-value intervention' that will 'benefit the public purse in the long run', because the children who are given breakfast become 'firmly part of the school system'. Yet the charity is run on private donations. Each breakfast costs just 22p per child, partly because the juice is provided free of charge by Tropicana and the porridge oats by Quaker. But McConnell still buys in boxes of cereal. 'If there was a nice supermarket that wanted to help us…' she hints, 'that would be brilliant.' In the meantime, if anyone wants to donate, a mere £3.50 – not much more than a large latte – buys one child a month's worth of the most important meal of the day.