The London school with the city’s best breakfast club where kids sample food from around the world and play the piano

Breakfast is often described as the most important meal of the day, but many people still skip it. Some adults seem to survive on a morning of coffee, but for children especially, a good breakfast can set them up perfectly for a day of learning, playing, and growing.

Hollydale Primary School in Peckham was recently crowned as having the best breakfast club in London in the annual Kellogg awards, and the school said the transformation of its offering has had a huge impact on pupils.

Principal Reema Reid told MyLondon that winning the award was the result of a “trickle-down effect” from the school’s leadership, which aspires to be the best it can be, inspiring staff and fostering a positive culture. She said the children not only benefit from the best breakfast club, but also the best overall school experience.

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Hollydale’s breakfast club wasn’t always as successful as it is today. When Ms Reid joined the school in 2013, there was already a breakfast club with just 10 children and it was run by people outside the school.

Ms Reid said: “It wasn’t really part of what you were proposing or the start of the school day. It was just something more incidental. So I decided straight away that we needed to get more children into school because a lot of them had a habit of coming in quite late, coming in late or five minutes after the bell.

“Parents’ excuses were like, ‘He was late for breakfast.’ So we decided to put an action plan in place to improve and grow the breakfast club as it was.”

The school partnered with the Greggs Foundation, a grant-making organisation that aims to improve the health and wellbeing of people living in the communities where Greggs operates, to help develop its breakfast club. The money allowed the school to purchase “quality food and games to keep the children occupied during their stay,” says Ms Reid.

With all the developments within the club, they have grown from 10 to 40 students, the maximum number they can accommodate. The breakfasts are healthy and varied, not just the same thing over and over again, but foods from all over the world. The breakfast club is not just about eating, but also about learning, both through food and play.

Ms Reid said: “We have developed this concept from simply providing quality food to constructive or structured learning during the breakfast club. Children have the opportunity to practise piano, for those who have lessons, or to sit and read quietly.

“There’s the opportunity for physical play – gross motor physical activities – outdoor play, indoor play, and arts and crafts that relate to different events throughout the year. So kids can work on black history, Windrush, different things throughout the school year, but they’ll do some of those activities during breakfast club.”

She described the club as “structured, but also relaxed” because they have the opportunity to go out and socialize, but also to improve themselves through learning.

All children are welcome at the club, which starts at 8am, an hour before the official start of the school day, regardless of their economic status. The club is inclusive not only in this way, but also across ages, with all age groups welcome.

Karen Lewis is the staff member who oversees and manages the breakfast club. She has worked at Hollydale longer than Ms Reid and has seen how the old breakfast club operated. She said: “There was basically no support there. There was nothing going on in the old breakfast club.”

She said of the new breakfast club: “They come in every day with a different fruit, a different jam to try and they love it. They also give us feedback on what they want, which is great. We listen to the children, that’s what Mrs Reid said to us: ‘This is not your breakfast club, this is for them, let them give us ideas on what they want’. And they say: ‘Oh, can we try this? Can we try that?’ So we’ve tried lots of different things but it’s working really well.”

MyLondon then got to chat to 9-year-old Nell, who attends the Breakfast Club. She was very enthusiastic about everything about the club and what it had to offer. She said her favourite things were being able to practice piano and play chess, with one of the highlights being an incredible mask she made while doing arts and crafts.

The Hollydale Breakfast Club is a hit with students and Kellogg’s thinks it’s pretty good too. When asked what the award meant to Ms Reid, she said it was “recognition” that things were going well at the school. Ms Reid is passionate about her school. She won the National Principal of the Year Award in 2021 and knows that the work she does to be the best inspires her staff to strive to be the best in everything they do. The main beneficiaries of this award are, of course, the children.

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