Free School Meals: Coronavirus

(asked on 20th April 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether schools will be reimbursed if they bought free school meals vouchers from another retailer due to being unable to access the Edenred scheme during the covid-19 outbreak.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 27th April 2020

To provide free school meals for pupils not attending school we are encouraging schools to speak to their catering team or provider in the first instance to see if they can prepare meals or food parcels that could be delivered to, or collected by, families. Where this is not possible, we have developed a national voucher scheme to enable schools to provide supermarket vouchers.

We are providing extra funding to schools, on top of existing budgets, to cover unavoidable costs incurred due to the coronavirus outbreak that cannot be met from their existing resources. This includes local free school meal arrangements set up by schools to support eligible children, where our national voucher scheme is not appropriate or before it was introduced. The guidance on this additional funding is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-financial-support-for-schools.

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