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

This project scrutinised the Free School Meals measure. It looked at its suitability for use in research and policy, and considered the merit of alternative or complementary measures. 

Why this research 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 highlights numerous problems with the FSM measure. For example, it is used as a proxy for a variety of different concepts, it underestimates children in poverty, and limitations arise from its binary nature. In addition, the FSM measure does not necessarily identify equivalent children across time and place. This 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 did the project involve?

The research team evaluated 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 – how this has changed over age, stage, time, and place – and how closely FSM corresponds 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.  

4. Synthesising the key messages and implications to inform recommendations for the use and understanding of FSM data; and proposing potential alternative or complementary measures for use in research and policymaking. 

Project findings

• Many children living in poverty are not entitled to be registered for FSM, due to the low income threshold and eligibility rules that ignore factors like housing costs and family size.  

• Under registration for FSM was especially high among younger primary children  

• School Local authorities and schools invest in a range of approaches to maximise FSM registration, though there is still variation in FSM registration practices.  

• Despite increased efforts to maximise registration there are still barriers for parents/carers applying for FSM.  

Policy recommendations 

• Expand the coverage of FSM eligibility by removing restrictions on FSM eligibility for pre-school children and increasing the salary threshold. 

• Introduce a national system of centralised auto-enrolment for FSM to reduce the number of entitled children missing out on free meals and associated support, and to ensure that policy is implemented as intended and reaches those it is designed to benefit.  

• Extend auto-enrolment across educational stages by linking data collected at the statutory school stage with information from the pre-school years.  

• Simplify the registration process for children from families with no recourse to public funds (NRPF) by addressing administrative barriers, clarifying government guidance, and reducing fears that claiming FSM could affect immigration or asylum status.  

• Clarify free early years meal policy and ensure providers are properly resourced to deliver meals for all children meeting FSM eligibility criteria, regardless of the type of early years setting.  

• Prioritise the development of a composite measure of disadvantage using individual-level FSM combined with area-level deprivation.