Middlesbrough Primary School pupils missing out on education due to sleeping in

Primary pupils are sleeping in, not arriving at school until 10am, and are losing a full day of education every week, a meeting has heard.

Middlesbrough Council’s Children and Young People’s Learning Scrutiny Panel heard it then takes schools up until Christmas to get pupils with low attention spans back to where they were before the Summer Holidays.

The comments came as the panel discussed the work being done to tackle food poverty and food insecurity by the Middlesbrough Food Power Alliance (MFPA).

MFPA – coordinated by Middlesbrough Environment City – brings together 15 organisations to address four areas – school holidays, maximising income, surplus food and optimising healthy start.

On Monday, Lauren Perkin, coordinator of Food Power, told the panel how, according to MFPA research, primary school children in Middlesbrough’s most deprived areas are affected by poor diets over the school holidays.

“The schools say the problem they have is children come back to school with low attention spans,” she said.

“They sleep in and are not attending school until 10am. By Friday, they’ve lost a whole day of school.

“Schools tell us about children falling asleep at their desks because they’ve been fed unhealthy food for that time over the holidays.”

She added: “They’re working up until Christmas to get them back to where they were in July.”

The panel heard about the success of this year’s Feast of Fun project which aims to tackle the problem with children’s nutrition during the Summer Holidays.

Organised by Together Middlesbrough and Cleveland – a partnership of local churches, community groups and schools – the Feast of Fun provides meals, as well as activities for children.

Currently in its fifth year, 25 communities across Middlesbrough, and Redcar and Cleveland, are included in the initiative which is aimed at taking the pressure off parents.

Heather Black, development officer at Together Middlesbrough and Cleveland, said this year’s Feast of Fun had been a success on more than just a nutritional level.

She said one dad had told her: “I feel loved and my family feels loved because of coming here.”

Ms Perkin said: “There’s a lot of bad press about Middlesbrough.

“But there’s loads of things we do that are very, very positive.

“We have the highest numbers of families on low income in the whole of England.

“And it’s the low income families that are the ones that are going to be struggling as we go into the holidays.”

To help improve the response to food poverty and food insecurity, Ms Perkin recommended a joint South Tees application for funding by Middlesbrough and Redcar and Cleveland Council to Holiday Activities and Food Research Fund.

Panel chair, Alma Hellaoui, said she wanted to emphasise the positive response made by groups like Feast of Fun and MFPA.

“What we’ve heard makes me worried about the town,” she said.

“But I am reassured about these excellent work that’s been going on through these projects, and the statistics .

“It helps us to clearly see what the position is and see where we might want to go in terms of recommendations.