Highlights:
- School children who eat breakfast ‘regularly’ perform better in exams.
- The researchers found 30 per cent of kids ‘rarely or never’ ate breakfast.
- Half a million children are arriving at school each day too hungry to learn.
- Students who rarely ate breakfast got nearly 2 grades lower than those who rarely miss it
London: As researchers have found that students who rarely ate breakfast on school days achieved lower grades than those who ate it frequently.
Adding together all of a student’s exam results, they found that students who said they rarely ate breakfast achieved nearly two grades lower than those who rarely missed their morning meal.
Here is a helpful video for little tips and tricks for making some attraction to do breakfast:
For the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, researchers from the University of Leeds demonstrated a link between eating breakfast and GCSE performance for secondary school students in the UK.
“Our study suggests that secondary school students are at a disadvantage if they are not getting a morning meal to fuel their brains for the start of the school day,” said study lead researcher Katie Adolphus from the University of Leeds in UK.
“This research suggests that poor nutrition is associated with worse results at school,” Adolphus said.
For the findings, the researchers surveyed 294 students from schools and colleges in West Yorkshire in 2011, and found that 29 per cent rarely or never ate breakfast on school days, while 18 per cent ate breakfast occasionally, and 53 per cent frequently.
Their figures are similar to the latest national data for England in 2019, which found that more than 16 per cent of secondary school children miss breakfast.
Those who rarely ate breakfast scored on average 10.25 points lower than those who frequently ate breakfast, a difference of nearly two grades, after accounting for other important factors including socio-economic status, ethnicity, age, sex and BMI.
Alex Cunningham, Magic Breakfast CEO, said: ‘This study is a valuable insight, reinforcing the importance of breakfast in boosting pupils’ academic attainment and removing barriers to learning.
This report provides impressive evidence that eating a healthy breakfast improves a child’s educational attainment, which supports our own findings of improvements in a child’s concentration in class, readiness to learn, behavior and punctuality.
