From eligibility to enrolment: How local authorities increase Free School Meals take-up and support schools
14 October 2026
From September 2026, Free School Meals (FSM) eligibility expanded significantly across England and Wales. In England, all children in households receiving Universal Credit are now eligible due to the removal of the £7,400 earnings threshold. The same expansion has happened in Wales, but currently just for Years 7 and 8, with further year groups expected to follow.
While these changes bring real opportunities to support more families, they also introduce new complexity. Many funding decisions will continue to be linked to the previous eligibility criteria rather than applying to all those now eligible. As a result, the reform has led to three distinct groups of eligible pupils: Targeted, Expanded and Universal.
Identifying and correctly recording each pupil’s FSM group has become very important, as this must be correctly recorded to secure Pupil Premium, National Funding Formula, Pupil Development Grant and School Essentials Grant funding. As eligibility is never automatic, families still need to apply, which makes take-up support more important than ever.
Listen back to hear
- Free School Meals policy and changes
- Data matching and auto enrolment to increase FSM take-up in Wrexham
- FSM and auto enrolment – Sutton’s story
- Running successful Free School Meals take-up campaigns
Guest speakers
Listen back to our speakers
"We’ve registered 730 children through auto-enrolment, 470 of which have become newly eligible for Pupil Premium. This equates to around £650,000 in the first year alone. It didn’t take us a lot of local resources to do this, thanks to bulk emails, bulk Free School Meal checks and just a little bit of local data matching. We were basically doing this alongside our existing roles, without employing additional staff.”
“The time it took to do the data sort was about seven hours in total. It wasn’t particularly vast once all the data work had been done. We awarded 104 cases for Free School Meals. The impact over the life of those awards was around £1 million in total in terms of the cost of the meals, School Essentials Grant and Pupil Deprivation Grant. Small numbers, but huge amounts of money.”
Free School Meals case studies
See all case studies
Wrexham and Pembrokeshire Councils boost Free School Meals and School Essentials Grant take up with two data-led approaches
How Surrey uses shared data and co-ordinated delivery to support residents across the county
