Pupils in poverty missing out on free school meals

A new report explores the strengths and weaknesses of free school meals (FSM) and Pupil Premium (PP) as measures for identifying disadvantaged pupils in England.

It finds significant differences between the number of children estimated to be living in poverty and those who are receiving FSM or PP.

The report, published by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, finds that there are fewer children registered for FSM than estimated to be in poverty. This is due to a number of factors including the low-income threshold (£7,400 per year), under-registration, and eligibility rules that ignore factors like housing costs and family size.

Under-registration for FSM is especially high among younger primary children and seems to be higher in more deprived local authorities, meaning support is not always reaching the children who need it most.

The gap between the number of children living in poverty and the number of children registered for FSM or receiving the PP is especially noticeable for children from certain communities, including those from Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian backgrounds. In these groups, poverty rates are much higher than FSM or PP registration suggests, meaning many children in need may not be receiving adequate support.

Children are signed up for PP if they are ever registered for FSM over the preceding six year period. But there are significant differences between schools and local authorities in how often children signed up for PP are registered as FSM-eligible. In some schools, only a small percentage of PP children are registered for FSM each year, while in others, nearly all are. To the extent that number of registrations for FSM represents persistence of poverty, this means that in some schools and local authorities, the PP group is far more disadvantaged and in longer-term poverty than in others. But funding and provision does not account for these different severities of disadvantage.

The report recommends that the government should conduct updated studies using linked cross-government data to find out how many eligible children are not claiming FSM or registered for PP.

It also recommends that the government expand the coverage of FSM eligibility, remove the current restrictions on FSM eligibility for pre-school children, increase the salary threshold for families, and provide sufficient funding.

The government should consider centrally automatically enrolling eligible children for FSM to ensure better coverage, especially for younger children.

The report also calls for policymakers to consider ethnicity and language background alongside FSM and PP, for example when comparing the experiences and outcomes of FSM/PP children to their peers. This is because the underlying characteristics of groups of children registered for FSM/PP have changed over time and vary by place. As these factors are not stable within the groups, they may often explain to some extent apparent differences in outcomes according FSM/PP status.