Have you ever been really hungry? You are six years old. Your stomach makes a noise that sounds like a rumble but feels like a groan. Half an hour later, it sounds like an angry dog and feels like a piercing wail.

Now, answer a maths question you’ve never been asked before. Go on, 30 other kids are looking at you and listening. What’s the answer? The acid in your belly starts to burn. Your mouth is dry. You lick your lips, you wipe them with the back of your hand and you wish you didn’t because it feels sticky. When did you last eat? Dinner. What’s the time now? 9am. Dinner was 14 hours ago. How far away is your free school lunch? Too long, far too long. You feel dizzy, your pulse beats into the back of your head.

Now, read a word for the first time that is written nothing like it sounds. Try to draw a picture. Try to pronounce the name of a dinosaur. You can’t. You feel stupid.

Despair turns to anger, you become defensive. Why do you need to know any of this anyway? Who cares? It’s all stupid. Your desire to learn shuts down. You lash out at everyone around you.

All of this could have been avoided if you’d just eaten breakfast. But there was no breakfast at home today, there was none yesterday and there will be none tomorrow.

There is nothing a small child can do to change this on their own. They need some magic or their chance to reach for the stars may be gone forever.

There is magic available, and we can all help it become more so for more kids. We can help this magic cast a sustainable spell across the country for 22p a day. 22p will give one child a breakfast of porridge, cereal, nutritionally enhanced bagels and orange juice. 22p a day could help the six- year-old you became in the first few paragraphs solve that sum, read that word, draw that picture or wrap their tongue around a rhoetosaurus (REE-tuh-SAWR-us). In many cases this 22p a day will give a child a better future and society a better citizen.

The Magic Breakfast Charity supplies free, healthy, breakfasts to 8,000 children in 240 schools. It has 160 schools on its waiting list requesting urgent food aid.

As well trying to ensure every hungry or malnourished child at school has access to a healthy breakfast, The Magic Breakfast’s goal is to find sustainable long term financial solutions to ensure that each school can run independent breakfast provision that it is able to continue without reliance on food aid.

This is a glorious goal, the ideal for any charity is to one day make itself unnecessary by helping people to help themselves.

When Nick Clegg announced that there will be free school lunches for all children in infant schools in England from September 2014, Carmel McConnell, The Founder of Magic Breakfast, asked: “What about the morning lessons? Schools beg us for free breakfast foods in order to be able to teach.”

There are kids who come into class and faint and kids whose behaviour becomes so bad that they are excluded, cast out for now and possibly forever, all because they are hungry.

Do you think these kids are far away statistics? Studies show that they are not.

Two starving children could be sandwiching your child at school while you read this.

If these kids could get a good breakfast, they’d be less likely to disrupt your child’s learning because they are distracted by hunger.

As parents we are first of all responsible for looking after our own.

This is how it should be, but there is no point in pretending that things will get better if we don’t start looking after other people when we can.

The ideal breakfast club creates an atmosphere, (like many run by volunteers that I’ve read about) where it is an equally welcoming and warm place for those who can afford to pay and those who currently need help. Breakfast clubs are about more than nourishment too. They get kids around a table together to develop the communication and social skills that are becoming lost with more meals now eaten in front of screens rather than people. This interaction gets kids ready to learn.

If we wait for the government it will be too late for too many kids. The incredible Carmel at The Magic Breakfast hasn’t: her magic helps 8,000 kids a day.

Of course we can’t all help that many. But what if, all of us who can, just helped one child. All it needs to reach everybody is for half the population to help one person.

You are six years old. It is now 11am. Lunch is an hour away. You’ve eaten nothing since 7pm yesterday. No food for 16 hours. Nothing. The wail in your tummy has turned to an ear-splitting scream.

You don’t want to learn, you want to cry.

To find out more go to www.magicbreakfast.com/

Alex will donate his fee for this article to The Magic Breakfast