Popular Peterborough breakfast club to restart next week
The community group, led by the charity Compas, fed over 200 school pupils twice a week before running out of funding
Last updated 26th Apr 2024
A Peterborough breakfast club is restarting next week, after it was set up to support families through the cost of living crisis.
In 2021, the CPCG (Consortium of Peterborough Community Groups), led by the charity Compas and supported by the local council, started to provide pupils from Gladstone Primary Academy with a nutritionally-rich breakfast.
It soon began providing healthy morning meals to hundreds of children from the local community, before it was forced to close last month due to a lack of funding.
Now, further government funding has been secured to keep the breakfast club running for another 6 months.
It's hoped volunteers can be back handing out nutritious meals outside Gladstone Park Community Centre from next week.
CEO of the Compas charity, Petr Torak, said: "I come from a background where I know how it is to go to school hungry, not being able to concentrate, looking around when all the children have got some fancy lunch boxes and it's very difficult then to focus your mind on education."
"The breakfast club improves the attendance definitely, it helps with the social interaction and cohesion as well, you know, it was not just parents from Eastern Europe or from Asian countries or Africa, loads of parents would come behind the table and help us to serve the breakfast as well."
He added: "Children quite often either go hungry to school or they go to school with a pack of crisps, energy drink and so on. So we thought we would try this trial and it was very successful."
"We've been actually working with the head teacher from the next door school and it was very apparent that not only the attendance had improved, children on the two days when we were doing the breakfast club were running into the school and waking up their parents early in the morning."
"We were also using this opportunity to interact with people and talking to them about carbon monoxide alarms or giving out free toys, clothing, you know, stuff that we've been donated, hats and gloves in the winter, slow cookers, electric blankets."