Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to help ensure that children from families in receipt of Universal Credit receive free school meals.

Under the benefits-related criteria the department provides a free healthy meal to around 1.9 million children, ensuring they are well nourished and can concentrate, learn and achieve. We also spend around £600 million per year ensuring around 1.25 million infants enjoy a free, healthy and nutritious meal at lunchtime following the introduction of the Universal Infant Free School Meal policy in 2014.

Schools fund benefit-related free school meals (FSM) from their core funding which they receive through the schools block of the dedicated schools grant and is derived from the national funding formula. For 2022-23, the funding schools attract through the 'FSM factor' in the national funding formula (NFF) is increasing to £470 per eligible pupil. The per meal rate for Universal Infant Free School Meals was increased in 2022-2023 to £2.41.

Under this government, eligibility has been extended several times and to more groups of children than any other government over the past half a century, including the introduction of universal infant free school meals and further education FSM. The department has permanently extended eligibility to children from all groups with no recourse to public funds.

The number of pupils eligible for FSM has been increasing since 2018, when we introduced new eligibility criteria for Universal Credit families that was estimated to increase the number of free school meal pupils by 2022. Alongside this, we also introduced generous protections that meant no child would lose their free school meal eligibility as a result of this criteria change and throughout the rollout of Universal Credit.

We want to make sure as many eligible pupils as possible are claiming their FSM, and to make it as simple as possible for schools and local authorities to determine eligibility. To support this:

• We provide an Eligibility Checking System (ECS) to make the checking process as quick and straightforward as possible for schools and local authorities.
• We have developed a model registration form to help schools encourage parents to sign up for free school meals.
• We also provide guidance to Jobcentre Plus advisers so that they can make Universal Credit recipients aware that they may also be entitled to wider benefits, including free school meals.