What has ‘Free School Meals’ measured and what are the implications?

This project will scrutinise the Free School Meals measure. It will look at its suitability for use in research and policy, and consider the merit of alternative or complementary measures.

Why this project is important

Free School Meal (FSM) eligibility is a longstanding measure of child and family circumstance. It is used to identify children for targeting and intervention, allocate funding and resources, and evaluate policies and educational systems.  

However, research has highlighted numerous problems, including:

• FSM eligbility’s use as a proxy for a variety of different concepts
• its underestimation of children in poverty
• and the limitations of its binary nature.

There is also evidence of discrepancies and biases in FSM-attribution. FSM-attribution does not necessarily identify equivalent children across time and place. This is problematic because it can create the illusion of change over time or impact within evaluations of interventions and policy, such as apparent narrowing or widening of attainment gaps.

What does the project involve?

The research team will evaluate FSM in four strands of work:

1. Reviewing and synthesising the history of the FSM measure, including its use in research, policy making, evaluation, monitoring, resource allocation, and practice.
2. Investigating which pupils and families are represented by FSM, and how this changes over age, stage, time, and place. They will also investigate how closely FSM maps to the concepts it is used to proxy.
3. Exploring how identification as FSM-eligible relates to school attainment and factors such as self-esteem, confidence, wellbeing, and bullying. This will also be analysed for variation over age, stage, time, and cohorts and interaction with other characteristics and factors.
4. Synthesising the key messages and implications arising from the research; formulating recommendations for the use and understanding of FSM data from the past two decades; and proposing potential alternative or complementary measures for use in research and policymaking.

Project findings

The research will be of interest to the research and policy community.

The EPI will host a deliberative event to present findings and provide a platform for other researchers to offer contrasting perspectives and recommendations. Policymakers will be welcomed to share their priorities and concerns. Stakeholders from across academia, government, parliament, research funders, local authorities, and think tanks will also be invited to the event.

The final report will summarise findings from the event, alongside the messages from the four project strands.