Food for thought – do school meals improve classroom performance?

Do school meals improve children’s academic performance? Should schools provide breakfast as well as lunch? Researchers from the Jamaican University of the West Indies and the UK Institute of Child Health studied primary school children in Jamaica.

School lunch programmes are already in place in Jamaica but do not cover all children and do not target the most needy. The study found that eating breakfast can affect their achievement at school. Providing breakfast can improve attention and behaviour, but the classroom environment is also important.

Two school lunch programmes are available: one with meals cooked at the school; the other distributing buns and milk. The cooked meal is more expensive, and poorer children are more likely to join the bun and milk programme. Not all schools offer both meals and the programmes together cover only 20 percent of children. Most other children buy food from street vendors or shops, rather than bringing food from home or going home for lunch. Children eat a lot of sweets, snacks and sweetened drinks instead of or in addition to meals. However, the average energy intake is 17-20 percent lower than the daily requirement for their age group.

School lunch programmes may encourage earlier school enrolment, increase attendance and reduce early drop-out from education. However, providing breakfast could be more important. Giving breakfast to children at school:

• enhances certain cognitive functions and attention to tasks in the late morning, particularly for undernourished children
• improves attention and participation in well-organised classrooms, although it may worsen behaviour in poorly-organised schools
• increases school attendance and reduces lateness
• improves arithmetic scores in the short term.

Although the long-term effects have not been evaluated, high-risk children are more likely to benefit. The study concludes that health and education authorities could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of school feeding programmes by:

• targeting high-risk children, schools, or communities
• collaborating to improve the basic infrastructure of schools to maximise the benefit of improved child nutrition
• providing school breakfast
• conducting well-evaluated, long-term studies across many schools.

Source(s):
‘Breakfast and educational performance in schoolchildren’ by S. Grantham-McGregor, Postgraduate Doctor Caribbean 13 (1997)
‘Schoolchildren’s diets and participation in school feeding programmes in Jamaica’ by S. Walker et al, Public Health Nutrition 1 (1998)
‘Evaluation of school feeding programs: some Jamaican examples’ by S. Grantham-McGregor, S. Chang and S. Walker, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 67 (1998)

Funded by: Inter-American Development Bank; Nestle Nutrition Research Grant

id21 Research Highlight: 05 February 2001

Further Information:
Sally Grantham-McGregor
Centre for International Child Health
Institute of Child Health
University of London
30 Guildford Street
London WC1N 1EH
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 7905 2160
Contact the contributor: S.McGregor@ich.ucl.ac.uk

Institute of Child Health, University of London

Susan Walker
Tropical Metabolism Research Unit
University of the West Indies
Mona
Kingston 7
Jamaica
West Indies

Contact the contributor: swalker@unwimona.edu.jm

University of the West Indies

Other related links:
See this issue of International Health Matters on child health.

Child Health Dialogue is Healthlink Worldwide's newsletter on child health and disease prevention.

See the WHO Child Health and Development for further resources.

Refer to AED for information on child nutrition programmes.

The Partnership for Child Development promotes the health, nutrition and education of school-aged children.