The Government has announced that eligibility for free school meals (FSM) will be expanded to cover all children living in households that receive Universal Credit. Our Head of Research and Policy, Dr Rebecca Montacute, explains why the announcement is a major win in the fight to take hunger out of the classroom, but warns of potential challenges ahead.

The announcement from government to widen free school meal (FSM) eligibility to all children in families on Universal Credit (UC) is a very welcome one.

Sutton Trust research has long highlighted the impact of hunger in schools, including increasing numbers of teachers seeing students coming into school hungry during the cost of living crisis. And our research from the COSMO longitudinal study, which we run together with colleagues from UCL, found that 8% of families with children reported skipping meals, or being hungry but not eating, due to a lack of resources.

This hunger has a major impact in the classroom. Research from the US has previously shown that food insecurity in low-income households is linked with reductions in both cognitive and socio-emotional skills. Indeed, hunger negatively impacts children’s concentration, energy levels, behaviour and ability to understand and remember in school. Moreover, the tiredness that children experience from hunger has been found to reduce their exploration of their environment, impacting on skills development. We highlighted these issues in our policy briefing on the attainment gap ahead of the 2024 election.

We also highlighted that the previous income cap on free school meal eligibility excluded many families in which children will have been going hungry, and would benefit from food in schools. Families who are eligible for UC are six times more likely to be classified as food insecure than ineligible families. The Sutton Trust has long argued we should widen free school meal eligibility to this group.

The Government estimate the announcement will benefit half a million more children. Alongside previous government policies on breakfast clubs, this will go a long way to taking hunger out of the classroom.

What are the remaining issues?

The plans fall short of introducing auto-enrolment for free school meals, so eligible children will still only be able to benefit if their parents enrol them.

However, the measures will greatly simplify those eligibility rules. By making eligibility much easier to understand for parents, it’s likely to result in greater take-up, with more children getting the extra support.

And there are still other remaining challenges in the FSM system. Concerns have previously been raised about the amount provided to schools per meal, and on the nutritional value of the food provided.

What about pupil premium?

Unfortunately, the additional children brought into free school meal eligibility will not also be eligible for pupil premium – the funding which goes to schools to provide wider educational support for children who have been eligible for FSM at any point in the previous six years. In an ideal world, these children would also be eligible for this additional funding.

However, the Government faces a tough fiscal environment, and difficult decisions are being made across the board. Ultimately, feeding more children from homes that are eligible for Universal Credit, and are therefore the most likely to suffer from food poverty, is the right thing to do.

It is though also important to note that given the previous threshold for FSM eligibility (which will now be the pupil premium eligibility threshold) has been frozen in cash terms – (at just £7,400) since 2018-2019 – many children who should have had access to pupil premium funding have already lost out.

Separate to the free school meal expansion, the Government should urgently look to increase this threshold for pupil premium eligibility, to include students who would have previously been eligible. This should take place alongside an increase in the amount schools funding schools receive for pupil premium, to reverse the recent real terms erosion of these funds. And in the longer term, they should look to bring all of the now wider FSM group into PP eligibility.

This announcement will also for the first time see FSM completely separated from pupil premium, which will have wider ramifications.

Danger of future cuts

The biggest issue with decoupling these two sets of funding is what it could do to pupil premium funding in the long term. Free school meal funding is politically sensitive in a way that pupil premium funding is not. No Government wants to be seen to be cutting the number of children being fed in schools, but cuts to more hidden (but still vital) support for lower income children in the classroom would be unlikely to generate the same backlash from the public. We need to keep an extremely close eye on this in future, to ensure children don’t lose this support.

And impacts on data (boring but it matters!)

Data on FSM eligibility is used in a range of different ways, including by universities, employers and policy researchers. The impact of changes to the FSM eligible group brought in by this policy will need to be carefully considered.

For policy researchers, there have already been challenges in the consistency of FSM as a measure over time, due to necessary transitional protection measures brought in during the move to Universal Credit. Government will need to ensure that in the data provided to researchers it is clear where these changes have taken place. And ideally in future, they would allow researchers to look separately at this new wider group of FSM eligible students, alongside the narrower group eligible for pupil premium.

Looking to universities, institutions receive data on school FSM eligibility for student applicants, to provide them with a fuller view of a candidate and their circumstances. An open question for government is whether this data will continue to be for all students eligible for FSM, or whether it will be narrowed to only include the group who are eligible for pupil premium funding. This will need to be carefully communicated to universities, to ensure they have a full understanding of the data they’re being provided. This could include the Department for Education releasing additional contextual information on the full groups of students eligible for FSM and/or PP, for example the average income level of families in each group.

And increasingly, employers who look at the socio-economic background of their staff use previous free school meal eligibility as part of that picture, as it’s something that people can often remember about their time at school. As outlined, this data already has challenges when it comes to consistency over time, but this will add an additional complexity. Similarly, ensuring employers can access clear information on eligibility over time will help them make the best use of the information.

Looking forward

Overall, this announcement is a very positive one, which will benefit hundreds of thousands of children – putting them in a better place to learn in schools.

But more will be needed from government to fully tackle the attainment gap in schools, as we have outlined previously, including reforms to school funding, tackling school absences, and reducing social segregation in schools.

And it should also be noted that without other wider changes to reduce child poverty, including lifting the two-child benefit cap, many children will continue to go hungry outside of the school gates.

Hopefully, this marks the first positive step in a strategy to narrow – and eventually close – the attainment gap in schools, alongside broader efforts to end child poverty in Britain.