Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the Department for Education’s electronic eligibility checking system to encourage more parents to take their child’s free school meal entitlement.

The Department for Education introduced the eligibility checking system (ECS) to reduce administrative burden and bureaucracy; speed up the eligibility checking process; and to encourage take-up of Free School Meals (FSM) by removing stigma from the application process. The ECS has been incredibly successful and is used by every local authority in England. The introduction of the ECS has reduced the time normally taken to check eligibility from several weeks to a matter of minutes in most cases, massively speeding up the process to ensure free meals are swiftly made available to the most disadvantaged students. No research has been conducted specifically looking at the link between the introduction of the ECS and FSM take-up, however, we do know that under-registration dropped by 3 percentage points[1] from 2012 to 2013.

There are numerous reasons why a parent/child might not claim for a free meal to which they are entitled, and we are exploring what opportunities exist in the longer term to improve the way in which disadvantaged pupils are identified and to make the free school meals registration processes even more efficient.

[1] Furtehr details are available in the attached document.