Questions about the impact of universal credit on school funding are to be raised with the Department of Work and Pensions by the chair of an influential Parliamentary committee.
Tania Beard, head of St Martin’s CE primary and nursery in Cranbrook, Devon, told MPs today that she was expecting funding to “drop dramatically” due to the benefits change – which feeds into how many children the school gets pupil premium funding for.
And Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons education committee, said he would be very pleased if Ms Beard could provide him with further information saying “I would like to raise that with the DWP secretary”.
Ms Beard had explained earlier in the hearing that she used to have a difference of about 10 children between those who were on free school meals (who attract pupil premium funding) and the overall number classified as disadvantaged. Now the difference was about four times larger.
“There are a lot of families who are not getting free school meals and that’s going to have an enormous impact in six years’ time when those current children lose their ‘ever 6’ [pupil premium] funding,” she said.
Asked for more details, Ms Beard said that following a pilot rollout of Universal Credit in Devon, she had 93 children who were classified as disadvantaged but just 49 eligible for free school meals.
“In six years’ time our funding is going to drop dramatically and we use that funding to support our youngest children, so that they don’t then become children who have special [educational] needs as they go through. So they have additional nurture, have movement support, if that money goes this SEN crisis is going to get worse,” Ms Beard said.
Pupil premium, currently worth £1,320 for children in Reception to Year 6 and £935 for pupils in Year 7 to Year 11, is paid to schools for each pupil registered as eligible for free school meals in the past six years.
The government has said that, under Universal Credit, every child who receives a free school meal will continue to do so and, by 2022, around 50,000 more children will benefit from free school meals.
But Labour has said that up to 2.6 million children whose parents are on benefits could miss out on free school meals by 2022 after the earnings threshold for claiming free school meals was set at £7,400 in April 2018.
Pupil premium is only paid for those children who register to claim free school meals, not for those who are eligible but do not register. However, pupils who are registered do not have to take free school meals in order for the school to receive pupil premium money.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “It's right that we continue to support the most disadvantaged children. Our new criteria means that eligibility for free school meals will be based on earnings rather than hours worked and the protections will also ensure that no child that was previously eligible under the old system will lose their free school meal as a result of the introduction of Universal Credit.”
