Changes to free school meal eligibility…

This £7400 makes no sense at all. To be entitled to universal credit, if you have school aged children 3+, you have to work so many hours and earn a certain amount each month to qualify (more than 7400 per anun), this goes up the older your child gets. By the time they are at comp, you are expected to earn 35 hours at minimum wage (or equivalent to what that would be if you earn more and work less hours). Age 3-12 I think it’s around 20-25 hours. If you don’t earn that amount (and don’t have a disability or valid reason to not do so), you don’t get universal credit. So if the threshold is above £7400 to qualify, yet below £7400 to be entitled the FSM, how does anyone get them? I’m baffled.

There won't be additional school staff - the existing ones'll 'just' have to fit it into the existing day for free.

The cost comes where LAs refuse to do it, meaning the schools have to pay for a private service to access the data the previous conservative government made available to them. And where parents don't reclaim, as if it's not there by 4th October, there's no PP for their children.

All of which was known by the previous government, as it was exactly how they set it up - and why they extended the protection around the 31 March for April. Had they won the General Election, they'd have let it run out as well.

But it must have changed to that system at some point as it wasn't like that (indefinite FSM) when I had them. It was very formal being notified that we no longer got FSM and then subsequently, PP funding.

i believe the logic was because of research showing how that period of being on FSM impact the entirety of your childhood. So the funding is to help continue to close the gap and catch up.
Obviously in some cases it’s ludicrous.

I am genuinely baffled by this thread. When did it change that you were awarded FSM and then continue to receive them indefinitely?

This has massive impact on school applications in some areas and university applications more generally.

My children received FSM while I was studying for my nursing degree and then immediately on earning they were stopped.

Im Not saying it isn't, what I am saying is the story is bs. It lasts until the child finishes primary or secondary school. Primary school is seven years and secondary is five.

Eight years of financial support you don’t qualify for is a LOT of money.

Do you mean assuming the kids are poor because they live in a certain neighborhood? Don't think that would work tbh
There's streets round here with massive old buildings some of them have just one household living in the whole building as their house, others are split up into flats or bedsits where people have to share the kitchen and bathroom.

It only lasts until the end of their stage of education ie primary school. Sounds like she isn't being truthful

@Scrubberdubber your guess is as good as ours, she assumed once they started secondary it would stop, but it didn't, and still hasn't. Her kids bring home Asda vouchers before the summer holidays each year too!

you paid to go to the major museums

Many museums that are free are so because they get lottery funding. Opening access to people is part of the criteria for the funding they apply for.

It's not indefinite. It's to the end of the education period. So it stops at the end of primary, for example.

It's not forever.

I think that there should be more people on a reduced rate, say £1 a day, even at KS1, not free.

Part of the reason that the public finances are where they are has been the increase in things that have no charge at the point of use, instead of a reduced rate. There was not free bus travel for many people of pensionable age until the noughties, you paid to go to the major museums, for example.

How can she still qualify after 8 years? It last until your child finishes primary or secondary. Neither of those last 8 years.

@Scrubberdubber I said myself my colleague qualified, she was a student at the time with small children and so rightly got the assistance, now - 8 years later, she's a chartered accountant. Still qualifies though. Never said nor claimed ot have won any lottery or suddenly have this random unearned fortune.

Another friend of mine who is a single parent student training to become a nurse will very likely earn over the threshold once she completes her studies too - the point is, it isn't only given to those who are in poverty and stuck there - the whole point is aiming at those who still qualify when they don't need to anymore! no one is saying it should be taken away from those who qualify year on year.

Yeah multiple posters on here apparently know someone who won the lottery etc etc.

I just don't think most earning less than 7k at the start of reception will go on to earn loads more over the next few years. Myself personally started working more hours when the kids went to school, still far from rich just earn more than 7k

There’s literally a poster on this thread who was eligible indefinitely because she and her husband lost their jobs for a few months during COVID. How is that fair?

I’d support means-testing to include KS1 but agree with the threshold. Nobody is actually taking home 7k with a child, they’d have extensive benefits on top.

It's also dreadful timing for schools to be losing funding when budgets are screwed so much already

Zero looking at the bigger picture in this one

Multiple posters here have personal experience of families being eligible who are now on much higher salaries.

a couple of MN posters knowing people who jumped from earning less than 7k to earning a fortune is not an example of how it works generally.

I worked with poor and deprived families where, in 15 years, I never had a single family move from being eligible to not eligible for more than 2 years.

I wouldn't pretend my 100% experience was the same everywhere, but I'd put a lot of money it being more common than the vast salary increases talked about on here.

Fair enough I just think the threshold should go back to being 16k. 7.4k is too low in my opinion.

Makes far more sense than the current situation of everyone in reception to year 2 getting free meals including millionaires who could easily pay for their own meal.

We are a small family and I completely agree with it. You used to have to reapply if circumstances changed. When they made it that get it once and you get it for good we qualified because I was out of work for 6 months. My youngest was in first year of high school and would have received it for another 5 years even if I'd gone straight into a well paid job. Ridiculous system.

For a system like this to work then it needs to be seen to be fair and targeting the right children. Very few people will have a problem with funding the poorest children and using a threshold creates an objective measure of who should get the benefit and who doesn't.

The point is that it has been targeting the right children.

Children whose parents earn until 7k aren't suddenly going to be earning 50k in a couple of years. They're likely to be in other low paid, unstable employment and repeatedly bounce between being eligible and not.

The current system gives children, and schools, a level of stability. It also takes annual deadlines away from the chaotic families - again this benefits children and schools.

The cost of the admin of this is something that I'd bet hasn't been factored in. Something that will outweigh the savings I'd bet.

Where are you getting 90% from? Multiple posters here have personal experience of families being eligible who are now on much higher salaries.

Pupil premium funding should be linked to something else, maybe the catchment area rather than eligibility for free school meals.

I think it's not necessarily absurd but it is blatantly unfair which is possibly worse. For a system like this to work then it needs to be seen to be fair and targeting the right children. Very few people will have a problem with funding the poorest children and using a threshold creates an objective measure of who should get the benefit and who doesn't. There will always be those just above any threshold that feel hard done by but I also think that most people accept that there has to be a threshold somewhere and this is just how things go.
It must be incredibly irritating though to just miss out on these benefits and then realise that families far richer than you are recieving the additional benefit because their income once fell below the threshold. It makes a mockery of the whole system and beings the whole system into question completely unnecessarily.