Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of allowing pupils who are eligible for free school meals to use an unspent daily allowance on a future day.

The Department allocates funding to schools to support free school meals (FSM) provision, through their core budgets. In 2023/24, the funding rate for each pupil who is eligible for FSM stands at £480. In total, the Department spends over £1 billion each year on free meals, which now support over one third of pupils in England.

FSM are intended as a benefit in kind, rather than a cash benefit, and the Department’s primary interest is that schools meet their legal duties to provide nutritious free lunches to eligible pupils.

Schools have considerable freedom in how they deliver FSM, and it is important that pupils are claiming their free lunch each day. Schools and colleges should ensure pupils are not building up significant cash reserves on their accounts or regularly spending their allowances at other times of day without receiving their healthy lunch.