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Free School Meals: An OpenLearn reading list

Updated Friday, 7 April 2017
The provision of a hot meal at lunchtime to pupils is often at the heart of political debate. We dip into some of the research around the subject.

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School dinner at the National School, Oswestry - May 1, 1954 Dinner at the National School, Oswestry, 1954

Why do some children eligible for Free School Meals not receive them?

In 2012, research suggested that as more than one in four children who could be receiving Free School Meals were not taking advantage of the benefit. Angus Holford of the University of Essex carried out research into the peer effect. He found that encouraging a small number of children to take the meals had a larger knock-on effect:

Almost 300,000 entitled children do not participate in the UK’s Free School Meals (FSM) programme, worth up to £400 per year. Welfare take-up can be deterred by stigma and lack of information. This paper uses a school-level dataset and fixed-effect instrumental variables strategy to show that peer-group participation has a substantial role in overcoming these barriers. Identification of endogenous peer effects is achieved by exploiting a scheme which extended FSM entitlement to all children in some school cohorts. Results show that in a typical school a 10 percentage point rise in peer-group take-up would reduce non-participation by almost a quarter.

Read the full research at the University of Essex site: Take-up of Free School Meals: Price Effects and Peer Effects

How do children feel about Free School Meals?

As the Essex research implies, there can be a stigma around getting FSM when your friends don't. The Children Society's 2012 Fair And Square report went into more detail on this point - and suggest that a system change could help make things better:

We know that many children who are entitled to free school meals do not eat them every day, often because of teasing, bullying and fear of stigma. This is a major concern for many parents:

‘My older children have had free meals in the past and have been bullied as a result.’ Parent

How much parents worry about teasing and bullying varies. Parents of primary school children were less worried than those of secondary school children. This is because fewer primary schools use cash based systems and so younger children are less likely to be aware of who does and does not receive free school meals.

‘My child enjoys most of his school meals. He’s becoming aware that not everyone gets them free though, and this is a cause for embarrassment - if the school could come up with a system where everyone had a lunch ticket, paid for in advance, that would save a lot of heartache.’ Parent

What is clear is that both parents and children prefer ‘cashless‘ systems where children who get free school meals cannot be identified – such as a card based or biometric system. 

Read the report at the Children's Society: Fair and Square

Does it make sense to use Free School Meals as a proxy measure for disadvantage?

Measuring pupils who had been eligible for FSM as they move through, for example, the university system has been seen as a way of seeing social progress. If students at Camrbidge and Oxford had been getting FSM when they were younger, this could prove that those two universities were meeting targets to extend their student base to a wider range of backgrounds. That's the theory. But, for Cambridge, this was problematic. That University explained why in a statement for Newsnight:

A spokesman for the University of Cambridge said:- "The University of Cambridge uses a range of contextual indicators, including eligibility for Free School Meals, for the purpose of targeting our outreach work. The University uses a range of indicators because we believe that no single measure accurately captures disadvantage and under-representation. The limitations of FSM as a proxy for disadvantage and as a widening participation measure are acknowledged by the UK Government. The data excludes individuals who choose not to claim FSM. It excludes those with incomes too high to claim FSM who may still be regarded as disadvantaged. It excludes mature students, as it is captured at a single point in time – at age 15. Universities are not provided with data on the eligibility of their applicants for FSM. The University’s own data suggests that the official statistics on FSM significantly under-report participation. Our 2012 intake included 50+ students who had previously been in receipt of FSM. Around 10% of our current undergraduate body meets the household income threshold for FSM entitlement."

Read the full statement at Cambridge website: Free School Meals as a proxy for disadvantage

So why did the Department For Business, Industry and Science - which had responsibilities for universities and, as a result, widening participation - start using FSM figures? They explained in their 2011 report:

For 2008/09, BIS is publishing widening participation statistics by free school meal status rather than by socio-economic classification. Since 2007, the FYPSEC publication was produced annually and reflected the proportion of young people from the top three and bottom four socio-economic classes who participated for the first time in full-time higher education.

The publication also included an annex that reproduced some of the other published measures of widening participation (WP).

One of these WP measures, “the FSM measure” has been chosen to replace FYPSEC as the core measure of disadvantage in this publication. The “FSM measure” estimates the percentage of young people educated in English maintained schools aged 15 who progress to Higher Education by the age 19. Around 14 per cent of pupils in our dataset were eligible for and claiming free school meals.

The arguments for changing the core measure broadly were twofold. Firstly, there have been ongoing concerns with the quality of the socio-economic class variable that underpinned the FYPSEC measure. Secondly, the FSM measure is a well-established, versatile measure. The measure has helped to assess the number of children progressing to Higher Education from low income backgrounds. It is also one of two Higher Education metrics deployed to monitor the Government’s Social Mobility Strategy .

There is also a strategic link with the Pupil Premium announced by the Department for Education. In October 2010, the Government announced that FSM eligibility would be one of the criteria by which funds would be allocated. There is also a wider interest in the HE aspirations of young people in local authorities. The FSM measure is an individual-based measure that can be disaggregated at local authority level unlike previous measures such as FYPSEC.

Read the full report at the UK government website: Analysis of progression rates for young people in England by free school meal receipt and school type 

What effect does giving all pupils Free School Meals have?

Between 2009 and 2011, three local authorities were involved in a pilot scheme to explore the impact of opening up the FSM programme to a larger swathe of school pupils. In Newham and Durham, all primary school pupils were given a free lunch (the universal pilot); in Wolverhampton, the FSM scheme was extended to include pupils in primary and secondary education whose families received Working Tax Credits and earned less than £16,040 (the extended entitlement pilot).

The National Centre for Social Work picked through the results:

Impact on take-up of free school meals

  • Most pupils in the universal pilot areas took up the offer of free school meals. Around nine in 10 primary school pupils were taking at least one school meal per week by the end of the pilot compared with around six in 10 similar pupils in matched comparison areas.
  • The extended entitlement pilot did not significantly increase take-up of school meals among secondary school pupils.

Impact on attainment

  • The universal pilot had a significant positive impact on attainment for primary school pupils at Key Stages 1 and 2 (ages 7 and 11). Pupils in the pilot areas made between four and eight weeks’ more progress than similar pupils in comparison areas.
  • The strongest improvements in attainment tended to be among pupils from less affluent families and among those with lower prior attainment. However, the effects for different types of pupils were not always significantly different from one another.
  • By contrast, the extended entitlement pilot did not significantly affect attainment for either primary or secondary school pupils.

Impact on diet

  • In the universal pilot areas, the increased take-up of school meals led to a shift in the types of food that pupils ate at lunchtime: more vegetables, rice, potatoes, chips, water ; less sandwiches, fruit, crisps, soft drinks
  • Despite the changes in lunchtime food consumption, the universal pilot had few significant impacts on overall consumption of different types of food although children were less likely to eat crisps daily
  • The extended entitlement pilot had little impact on children’s diet and eating habits.

Read the full report at NatCen: Evaluation of the Free School Meals Pilot

 

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