The problem there is that whilst some people can be assessed via the live Universal Credit/National Asylum Support link (the one that local authorities have access to, but not all of them are prepared to have staff working with it), not everybody is. For those, the school staff have to assess an application as though they're employed to handle claims with sight of average earnings, assessment periods and taking a punt on the documents and the person being the person they say they are.
Telling somebody that you can't give their child FSM because they have no money coming in (due to a benefits error or their employer has gone bust, not paid them and UC are telling them they can't have any money until the employer tells them why they haven't paid them) so you can't assess their income isn't much fun. It's also pretty crap to tell somebody who has no money at all that their kid can't be fed either because they're too broke to be entitled to free meals.
The other issue is that when the entitlement to benefit ends for any reason - including errors and sanctions - if it were automatic, the food would stop immediately. And the live links that are compulsory are bad enough for the DfE computer systems failing to pick up the correct data or interpret it correctly (the live attendance data connection is terrible, for a start) - we really don't need something as important as feeding kids trusted to a system that will already swear blind that we have different numbers on roll to what we know is correct with no apparent way of getting the errors/ghosts in the machinery resolved.
I've always felt that if I wanted to spend my time assessing claims for benefit and dealing with the reactions of desperate people, I'd have applied to work for the job centre in the first place. I wasn't a fan of being told in front of others when I was nine that I couldn't have any lunch after today because my mummy needed to pay for my food, either. I also have other rather important things to be doing on 1st September than trying to deal with 800 people whose children aren't going to have anything to eat on Wednesday. I'd also prefer to actually take some of the annual leave I'm actually legally entitled to this summer; it isn't as though I've been able to for the last four years, but it would be nice for a change.
There's a separate scheme for FSM for children whose parents have No Recourse to Public Funds. Even that can be difficult, as you need to get somebody who may not be able to understand the forms to complete them - but at least there's no reliance upon an unwilling local authority or computer access and skills on the part of the parent. And people are scared that if they admit they don't have much money that we'll tell the Home Office and they'll be deported despite the entitlement to FSM (and compulsory education) being a child's right and legally not being included as part of the Public Funds prohibition.
A simpler solution would be for the DfE/Benefits to give access to the database to nominated people in school to deal with the majority of applications. Or, even better, have an automatic opt in so that parents don't need to apply, the fact they've been awarded a qualifying benefit being enough to notify us of eligibility. However, that's not possible, apparently, because the previous government made commercial deals with a small number of companies who charge for a service contract each school would be locked into.
I really hope that on Monday, we find out that it's been kicked along for another year, protected status remains for the secondary transition and the only change to the guidance is that the end date runs to the end of the Summer Term 2026 instead of the April it was extended to last Autumn. Oh, and that we get more than six hours' notice of what's happening in 2026/27.
But that's what happens when the system was deliberately set up to need redoing every single year. It was done specifically so the previous government could take it away without any challenge once they were more secure politically than they were.