Last year, the Department for Education announced that funding for this year’s Pupil Premium, which is calculated based on free school meals eligibility over the last six years, would be based on the school census carried out in October 2020 rather than January this year.
This means that 100,000 pupils who were newly eligible for Pupil Premium funding in the period between these two months, who would have previously received funding, are no longer counted, experts have said.
New government figures, calculated using data from January this year, show that the number of children now receiving free school meals has risen to 1.7 million compared with 1.44 million in January last year, equating to one in five pupils.
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