# A breakfast code. Retained until retirement?

**School data / England · checked 29 August 2026**

For parents, schools and readers who want to see the route taken by a new data field.

From autumn 2026, participating schools in England will record codes for attendance at the free breakfast club. The DfE privacy notice says a child’s information in the school-attendance collection is kept until state retirement age plus three years.

**What the documents show:** there is a field called “free breakfast club attendance code”, eight FBC codes, and a retention rule for the attendance collection. **What they do not yet show:** whether a daily breakfast history enters the same route and receives exactly the same retention.

![Two public routes for the FBC code: the daily attendance collection and the school-census module.](assets/route-figure.svg)

## The short answer

The privacy notice names the field. The census guide defines the codes. The retention rule belongs to the attendance collection. None of the four documents draws the complete arrow between them.

## The FBC codes

`FBC0` means the pupil did not attend and is the default code. `FBC1` means the pupil attended before the compulsory school day. `FBC2`–`FBC4` describe full closure because of staffing, premises or another reason. `FBC5`–`FBC7` describe partial closure for the same reasons. FBC0 through FBC7 inclusive means 8 codes. They are not a score about a family’s income or welfare.

## Two public routes

The DfE notice and sharing guide describe daily pupil-level attendance collection through the school MIS and Wonde, with a weekly manual route for some schools. The census guide asks participating schools to record FBC codes daily from autumn 2026 and describes the first spring 2027 return for 1 August–31 December 2026.

The four archived documents do not explicitly say that FBC enters the daily Wonde payload. The fact that both routes begin in autumn 2026 does not prove that they are the same upload.

## Retention

The notice says the child’s information, as part of the school-attendance collection, is kept until state retirement age plus three years, with annual review and secure destruction when it is no longer needed.

That is a collection-level rule. It is not proof that every FBC attendance has its own retention period, that a daily diary is kept until that term, or that the older public DPIA assessed the FBC field.

## The public DPIA

The DPIA linked from the DfE notice is dated September 2024. It describes the wider daily collection for approximately 9 million eligible pupils and lists an attendance code, not the “free breakfast club attendance” code. The 2026 census guide is the document that defines the new field. An older document does not answer whether an update exists for the new field.

## Boundaries

The geography is England. The breakfast field covers participating programme schools and pupils from Reception to Year 6. Paid or non-programme clubs are outside this definition. The sharing guide says information identifying a child is not published and individual school figures are not published publicly.

This page uses no child data, does not treat the code as a poverty indicator, does not give legal advice, and does not claim that an FBC daily history is kept until retirement.

## The open questions

1. Does FBC enter the daily Wonde payload?
2. Which document sets retention at field level?
3. What happens to corrections and periods after the census return?
4. Is there an updated DPIA for the 2026 field?

## Sources and update

The sources are the [DfE attendance privacy notice](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/privacy-notice-school-attendance-data-collection/privacy-notice-school-attendance-data-collection), the [2026–2027 census guide](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/complete-the-school-census/data-items-2026-to-2027), the [school-attendance collection DPIA](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66d83f677a73423428aa2f14/School_attendance_data_collection_DPIA.pdf), and the [daily-sharing guide](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/share-your-daily-school-attendance-data). The copies used for the build are archived locally and SHA-256 checked. Review is recommended by 31 July 2027 or earlier if a public document changes.

The [Romanian edition](https://mariuscomper.uk/micul-dejun-pana-la-pensie/) carries the same evidence, arithmetic and limits.