AIBU to think there is a stigma attached to taking up Free School Meals?

[cingolimama]

Would really value MNers experience here. DH and I have had a pretty disastrous year financially (redundancy for DH, drying up of contracts for me). However we are both working hell for leather to turn this around. In the meantime we're eligible for FSM, which frankly would be a big help. I also know that it helps the school gain a Pupil Premium.

But I'm a bit nervous about this. I don't want my daughter to be "targeted for help" as I believe anyone benefiting from FSM is (but perhaps I'm being idiotic - DD could surely use a booster in maths dept.) I also don't want any social stigma attached to this. It's a mixed school socially, but the majority is very middle class. Has anyone had any negative experience of taking this up? Or AIBU and it will all be fine?

[curlew]

Toys- I will put money on my politics being much further to the left the ours, and my principles being even more pie in the sky (unless you're Tony Benn)

Which is why I support the whole idea of targeting support at children who are in real danger of slipping through the cracks. Who often (not always) do not have well informed parents who can advocate for them. And who are usually at the back of the queue when good stuff happens at school, because they don't feel socially included, or it costs money, or the confident, well supported from home children speak up first, or, or, or.......

[curlew]

Than yours, not the ours....

[ToysRLuv]

See, I'm totally agreeing with you there. Only disagreeing about the current policy being good long term. My background in psychology and counselling makes me see the aspects that worry me. I'm glad that the government us trying to do something, though.

Also, I come from a country where my now retired df used to pay 60 % of his income in taxes to fund things like education, and we all thought of it as quite fair (even if at times annoying)

[ToysRLuv]

Ah, posted too soon.. Anyway, so I come to the discussion with a different experience and mindset to most..

[EeTraceyluv]

God, I wish we qualified! It would save a fortune.

[prettypleasewithsugarontop]

Slightly different situation here. We are not entitled to FSM's but all new P1 starts get them funded by LA - think this helps with the stigma

[unlucky83]

Been reading this on and off and it is frustrating me ...
Just because you get FSM doesn't mean your child is from a deprived background and likely to underachieve....
But many children will be ...
You could be well educated, motivated etc but on benefits due to ill health or family circumstances etc (My DD1s friend gets FSM at secondary but is highly motivated (more than my DD) and does well academically - FSM situation is due to divorce)
But if you have low aspirations with learning difficulties etc you are more likely to be, rather than not, on benefits and eligible for FSM.
I would rather schools got extra money for the first category even though not needed, than not give extra to the second to support these children.
Used to work at an inner city school, a real mix of children ...
At one end you had children turning up in Nursery at 3 not understanding the concept of a book -they had never seen one in real life- in nappies, unable to use cutlery (often whose parents had started life equally deprived) .... to ones who could read. The same children by age 11 one group were struggling to write more than a few sentences using basic words, the others, whose parents often arranged private tutors too, were discussing with the class teacher the use of un-, dis-, and anti-.
How do you decided the level of extra support a school needs?
Just looking at test results they are of older children - so potentially missing a particular high intake of the deprived ones.
Average results meaningless - the high results pulled down by the low and vice versa.
Looking at individual results - very time consuming -and again older children - who through extra resources the school may have been able to improve more - and also a disincentive for the school .
Looking at an area - not ideal if you have a mix...
Test/score them at nursery? Maybe but another tier of paperwork for teachers etc to deal with...(and an incentive for a school to exaggerate)
Looking at levels of FSM - not ideal but although you might be including ones who don't need the help, you shouldn't be missing the majority of children who do need help ... and that has got to be a good thing....
As to the psychological aspect - if you are talking about small children -the ones eligible for FSM throughout school - telling them they are less likely to achieve will do no more harm to their self esteem than being in a class full of children who are doing better than they are academically... the ones who don't need the extra help will not be effected by the 'label' as they won't be in the lower groups anyway ...

[friday16]

My background in psychology and counselling

Just what education needs more of. Less targeted help and intervention, fewer peer-reviewed prospective cohort studies, a reduction in focus on the basis for inequality and exclusion, and a great deal more counselling.

Real children, in the real world, are getting real benefit from PP. It was able to be introduced so quickly because tying school budgets to FSM levels (I simplify, but not by much) was fast and easy. What you're proposing would take years to take effect, and in the meantime, children who are being helped right now would not be receiving that help.

Your proposal that teachers can just identify those in need to help and get funding just like that is naive to the point of laughability. What would happen if a school decided that every single one of its pupils needed these extra resources? What would happen if a parent felt their child was in need of extra help, but the school or LEA disagreed? You've just re-invented statementing, complete with all its appeals and tribunals. But although schools exist where their level of statementing is a substantial fraction of their FSM level (the two are correlated to an extent) it's unusual, and the statementing process is necessarily complex and slow.

And if your concern is about "labelling", how is the "labelling" of a statement any less of an issue than the "labelling" of FSM --- it's worse for the child, if that's your issue, because FSM is about their parents while your process would actually be about the child directly.

I'm way, way, way to the left of mainstream politics, and the Lib Dems are the sort of hand-waving dinner party types that make my skin crawl. But the PP is a good, effective policy, and the quick and dirty approach of driving it off FSM is good, effective process. Perhaps if you actually went into some schools that are benefitting from it you might see why.

[friday16]

Who often (not always) do not have well informed parents who can advocate for them. And who are usually at the back of the queue when good stuff happens at school, because they don't feel socially included, or it costs money, or the confident, well supported from home children speak up first, or, or, or.......

This. Every word.

[curlew]

"As to the psychological aspect - if you are talking about small children -the ones eligible for FSM throughout school - telling them they are less likely to achieve will do no more harm to their self esteem than being in a class full of children who are doing better than they are academically... the ones who don't need the extra help will not be effected by the 'label' as they won't be in the lower groups anyway ..."

And you can't dismiss the psychological benefit of just giving a child attention. At my ds's school, they do a reading intervention programme with year 7s and 8s. Children arriving at the school with no diagnosed special needs, but with a reading age significantly below their chronological age spend an hour a week with a volunteer reading, being read to, playing a literacy based game, that sort of thing. These children are often eligible for FSM, by the way. If I had not actually seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed the difference that hour a week makes. It's nothing to do with the reading, in my opinion, it's a grown up actually spending one to one time with them. That's the sort of thing the pp can make happen.

[friday16]

"As to the psychological aspect - if you are talking about small children -the ones eligible for FSM throughout school - telling them they are less likely to achieve "

Who's doing that? Could you tell us about the school that is singling out small children to be told that they're less likely to achieve because they're on FSM? I suspect that now it's September Ofsted have got some inspectors just itching to do an emergency inspection and whack a school into special measures, and a school that was doing what you describe would be a pretty good candidate.

[HappyMummyOfOne]

"As to the psychological aspect - if you are talking about small children -the ones eligible for FSM throughout school - telling them they are less likely to achieve "

I highly doubt any school is telling them that! Children do work out from groups who is clever etc but thats about it.

Suggesting a school simply applies for more money for every child who needs support is madess, firstly theres not enough money and secondly statementing them all would be a nightmare and far more labelling.

Parents who claim FSM usually have a choice not to by gaining employment, those with SEN and a statement dont. They simpy cant be compared.

[marriedinwhiteisback]

Hmm remembers my bf on fsm when she felt ashamed of it. She's now a leading family lawyer who fights for women like her mum who were let down by a man. From the age of 16 she salted what she could into a slush found so she never found herself in that position. The stigma she felt was WRONG but I'm not sure it is morally right for schools to encourage fsm/benefits because they attract more money for the school.

When DH's mum was teaching 60's to 90's she said that in the early days it was normal to tell a child (she taught 10/11 at middle school - deprived W Yorks estates) that if they worked hard they could get good jobs and have a better life - it used to be OK to encourage them to aspire. Somewhere in the mid 70's that went out of the window and political correctness came in. From that point lives became more chaotic and the boundaries between right and wrong got blurred. A significant reason why we moved our dd from a top 100 comp aged 13 to the independent sector - because our values were not being underpinned at school in an environment more diverse than her "leafy" primary but where two families - prob amongst many ,single mums, with high achieving dd's had FSM, had been left in the lurch by men and supported their dds to the hilt. The PP was spent on all and it was generally the more supported girls who engaged with the enrichment activities it provided. Very little was there to deal with behaviour that stemmed from chaotic and distressed homes.

I don't know the right way to fund schools but if we have a level playing field of equality for state education then then I don't think it's via pp linked to fsm.

[unlucky83]

friday - I'm agreeing with you !!! - maybe badly worded - I thought that the labeling was a concern of toys

[ToysRLuv]

Well, I come from the "la la land" where there are no ability based teaching groups in schools, yet results (while not perfect) are so good that representatives from other countries, including the UK, come to learn from the system and how it's implemented. I recognise it's a different society, but it must be somehow not that utopian and strange, if the UK feels there is something there to look at. I am simply not comfortable with labelling, as I'm not used to it. Neither have I seen the benefits - I only know that there are potential pit falls.

As you know, I don't know the ins and outs and grass root practicalities of school budgeting, but wish to bring in another angle to the discussion. In my mind the whole school system needs a major overhaul. I know it's not going to happen. Sorry for annoying you all with my ridiculous ideals.

[RooRooTaToot]

I've just finished reading this thread and as a secondary teacher I just want to put forward how the sub-group targets work from my school's perspective.

Class teacher - it is our job to ensure all children reach their potential, to flag up any starting to underachieve and to put forward interventions. Next week I will be going through my year 11 results and explain why there was any underachievement. I will also be creating my action plans for my new groups in regards to differentiation and additional support which may be needed. These are added to and changed as the year progresses and includes SEN, G&T, EAL and FSM.

HoD, HoY and management regularly meet to look at the data for entire year groups from year 7 up to year 11 to discuss what intervention is needed.

In my school results are generally really good and most sub-groups do really well, but we are still struggling with our FSM sub-group.

For example (these are rough figures for ease of mathematics, but not too dissimilar), there are 100 students in a year group. 15 have FSM. The data for a year group shows that 90% of children are achieving their predictions or better. Our value added is fab with children achieving 1 or sometimes 2 levels higher than statistics say they should.

This all looks great until we look at the 10 who are underachieving, sometimes by quite a lot.
1 child is in and out of hospital a lot.
1 child has suffered bereavement
The other 8 are FSM.

It is management's job to work out why these students are not achieving. We want all these children to achieve. The PP helps us to try different interventions to stop these children on FSM falling through the cracks.

You will notice that the other 7 students on FSM are doing absolutely fine, so intervention is not needed for them.

So we could look at the stats and say 90% of our students achieve their predictions or better and look wonderful, but we can also say that 50% of students on FSM at our school fail to reach their potential. This should not be the case. It is wrong that with a free state education system there are those who are failing due to poverty and deprivation. It should not happen. The teachers don't want it to and neither does the government hence PP.

[ToysRLuv]

I know nobody is actually telling little children they are bound to fail just because they're on fsm, but the general assumption is there and officially validated if you know anything about the fsm-pp link. Also if teachers are meant to keep a special eye on the fsm children to prevent them from failing, before the signs are there, how is that guaranteed to not translate to differential treatment (whether positive or negative)? Or do we want fsm children who are not failing to potentially be treated/seen differently to other children? That is the problem I see. As well as the.. ahem.. adding validity to the benefit bashing (I won't say the d-word!) thus potentially widening the "gap". But, like I said, I'm glad that the government is trying to help..

[MoaningMingeWhingesAgain]

[curlew]

"People are feeling very insulted that because they receive FSM they are lumped in to the underachieving academic demograph."

[friday16]

Mike Godwin's original contention was that as any discussion on the Internet proceeds, the probability that someone will mention Hitler approaches unity.

There should be some sort of lemma to that, which we could call Toy's Law, where if the topic is education, Finland will probably be mentioned first.

[ToysRLuv]

I don't have all the answers, and I'm sorry I ever commented now. It's only that I know how official assumptions work, through my personal experience seeking help for pnd, and how demeaning they can feel when you're at the receiving end.

[ToysRLuv]

I don't think it's snobbery to have issues with the assumption that if you're poor (very temporarily or long term), your children are automatically seen as disadvantaged and in need of interventions. And that is the basic premise of pp. The system seems to be liked by schools (from what I see here), however, so what can I say..

[friday16]

"I know nobody is actually telling little children they are bound to fail just because they're on fsm, but the general assumption is there "

The general assumption is that there is a link, not that they are "bound to fail". Surely you can't have got the keys to your ivory tower without reading at least one paper which used correlation as infer links between demographic issues and outcomes?

We know a great deal about demographic issues that correlate to educational outcomes, by income, gender, ethnicity, language, class, parental education, whatever. The next part is trying to provide targeted help. To ignore demographic effects is to ignore one of the best sets of evidence that we have.

Raising the spectre of Finland is unhelpful: they simply don't have the demographic diversity we do. You can argue that we should aspire to the same state, but given the historic low levels of immigration to Finland and the high levels to the UK, it's not clear how possible this would be. But the argument "it's easy to fix education, we just have to fix society first" is hardly constructive.

[ToysRLuv]

Yes, the mention of Finland should be banned. It's probably not even a real country. Did I mention the president's name is Hitler (no relation to Adolf)?