Free school meal eligibility changes ‘could skew attainment gap data’, researchers warn
Fiona Simpson
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Changes to eligibility criteria for free school meals will make it “impossible” to correctly track the attainment of disadvantaged children over the next decade, researchers have warned.
A new report from the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) notes that the number of children eligible for free school meals increased by 300,000 between January 2020 and June 2021.
Those who became eligible during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were “disproportionately from more disadvantaged areas, and from schools which were most disadvantaged before the pandemic”, the report states.
These pupils were also more likely to be from an ethnic minority group and have English as an additional language compared with both pupils who were already eligible for free school meals, and pupils who were not eligible for free school meals in either January 2020 or January 2021, it adds.
However, researchers claim that changes made to the Universal Credit roll-out which affect free school meal eligibility “is likely to pull the average attainment for the whole disadvantaged group upwards”.
The changes mean that families who were eligible for free school meals between April 2018 until the end of the Universal Credit roll-out, which is planned for summer 2023, will retain their free school meal eligibility for the whole transition period and until their phase of either primary or secondary education ends.
“This applies even if their family circumstances improve and they would ordinarily no longer be eligible for free school meals,” the report states.
It adds that the changes will also make it difficult to ascertain how “persistently disadvantaged” pupils are compared with their peers.
The NFER is calling on the government to urgently explore the development of a new set of measures to better understand and interpret the evolution of attainment among disadvantaged pupils and their peers.
Jenna Julius, senior economist at NFER, said: “While changes in the attainment gap are already subject to potential misinterpretation, it is going to become increasingly difficult to understand how the attainment of disadvantaged pupils is evolving over time.
“If we want to monitor changes in attainment between young people from different backgrounds in future and develop policies to address these, policymakers should urgently explore the development of a basket of measures to better understand and interpret the evolution of attainment among disadvantaged pupils in the coming years.”
The report also states that the pupil premium has not been “successful in protecting funding for disadvantaged children over time”.
According to the NFER, if the grant had kept in-line with inflation since 2014/15, then primary and secondary schools would be receiving £160 and £127 more respectively per eligible pupil this academic year.
