Breakfast club early adopters grant: 2024 to 2025 academic year

This guidance is for:  

• local authorities  

• school leaders  

• school teachers  

• governing bodies and their representatives 

The government has committed to offering a free and universal breakfast club in every primary school. The Department for Education has selected schools to become early adopters through an expression of interest process. Early adopters will work with the department to understand barriers to delivery, shape plans for national rollout, and ensure schools across the country have good practice to draw on. They have been selected to ensure a wide range of representation across different school characteristics.  

Conditions of grant 

This guidance sets out the terms and conditions applied to the funding for eligible institutions that are taking part in the early adopters scheme. 

Methodology  

This guidance will help schools and local authorities understand how the grant is calculated for April 2025 to July 2025 and how it will be paid. 

Payments and allocations 

Payments willwere be made in 2 phases:

• we have published allocations for the fixed payment which will be made at the end of April 2025 for local authorities and beginning of May 2025 for academies
• awe secondpublished paymentallocations in arrearsNovember willfor bethe madesecond atpayment thein endarrears ofmade in November 2025 for local authorities and beginning of December 2025 for academies - this second payment willis beor has been determined by actual pupil uptake and data will be collected from schools between May 2025 and June 2025

We will aim to communicate payment schedules for the following academic year in summer term 2025.  

Further details  

If early adopter schools have any questions about delivering their breakfast club, please reach out to us via the department’s Customer Help Portal.