Calls for auto-enrolment system for free school meals

A letter from charities and local councils has been sent to Schools Minister, Damian Hinds, calling for the government to take action to ensure all children who are entitled to Free School Meals (FSM) are able to receive them.

Currently up to 250,000 children living in some of the most deprived households are missing out on their statutory right to a daily hot nutritious free school meal, with reasons including administrative barriers and language issues.

The letter is co-ordinated by the School Food Review, Bremner&Co and The Food Foundation and signed by 130 representative from charities, councils and academia including the NEU, CPAG and Feeding Britain.  

Evidence from Fix Our Food, one of the signatories of the letter, shows local authorities are taking matters into their own hands to test opt-out systems, including Wakefield, Lewisham and Lambeth. The results suggest that the current FSM registration process could be entrenching inequality in schools. For example, in Lambeth, 89% of pupils newly registered for FSM came from lone parent households, 59% came from households with English as an additional Language, and 79% from Black, Asian and Multi-Ethnic backgrounds (compared to 66% of the school population). 

Local authorities using an opt-out rather than an opt-in system to receive FSM report opt-out rates as low as under 1%. This compares to the Department for Education’s own figures showing 11% of pupils entitled to FSM are not registered to receive them under its scheme. The charities and councils cite complex administration, language or literacy issues and fear of stigma as some of the reasons for this. 

With 20% of households with children in the UK experiencing food insecurity in January 2024, the need for FSM to lighten the financial burden on families struggling with the cost of living crisis remains urgent. 

Pupil premium funding is also given to schools in England for each primary pupil (£1,455 per year) and secondary pupil (£1,035 per year) who have been eligible for FSM at any point in the last six years. This means schools are missing out on this extra funding if eligible pupils are not signed up to FSM. 

Research from FixOurFood has pooled data from 5 local authorities in England which implemented FSM auto-enrolment in October 2023. Results suggested that over 2,500 additional children had been registered to receive free school meals as a result of auto-enrolment, bringing in over £4.5million in additional school funding. Wakefield City Council alone registered an additional 1,183 children through the opt-out model.   

As a matter of urgency, the letter calls on National Government to commit to introducing a revised Free School Meal registration process so that all children entitled are automatically registered.

In the interim, the letter suggests the government promote and support local authorities to implement the ‘opt-out/right to object’ FSM model.

And provide datasets to each council to show the current levels of under-registration, by combining relevant DfE and DWP datasets.