After the government made it quite clear that they didn't care about kids going hungry during the holidays, and during a time when school budgets are in dire straits, they have now cut pupil premium funding to schools at a time when the number of children needing free school meals has gone through the roof.
The way they have done this is quite sneaky. They have changed the date that the FSM data is collected on from the January school census to the one the previous October. This means that schools will miss out on a year's pupil premium funding for children who signed up for FSM between Oct 2020 and Jan 2021, where those children would have previously been eligible for funding.
"An FOI obtained by Jolley shows the DfE has assessed the financial impact of the date change. But it refused to release it, claiming it “could harm the department’s reputation in regard to the accuracy and credibility of the statistical information it produces”.
Vicky Ford, the children’s minister, told the Stoke-on-Trent Live website the change “won’t actually make a huge difference. What we’ve done is to give schools more certainty for the year ahead. If you based it on the January census, they have got very short notice.”"
And yet FOI requests show that it will actually make millions of pounds worth of difference.
schoolsweek.co.uk/revealed-how-much-your-area-will-lose-from-pupil-premium-funding-change/
You can view how much your local council will lose in pupil premium funding because of the change here (where data was provided in FOI requests):
schoolsweek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Pupil-Premium-changes-3.xlsx