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Free School meals
A cl i has just emailed to say that she cant get free school meals because she gets Contribution based ESA. The family are on UC and have no income from earnings at all but the council’s website states -
“If you are claiming the benefits listed below you are not eligible for free school meals. This is regardless of what other benefits/credits are being claimed.
Working Tax Credit
Contribution-Based Job Seeker’s Allowance and/or Contribution-Based Employment and Support Allowance”
I have looked up the guidance to LA’s re free School meals aqnd I cant find any mention of exclusion in the terms above.
Has anyone else come across this?
Entitlement to free school meals is set out in legislation and is not affected by what the council has written on its website.
If you get UC and have earned income below the relevant amounts, then you qualify. Entitlement is not then further affected by whether you are also getting nsESA or whatever else.
Possibly it is just a poor choice of wording.
A quick update-
Unfortunately it seems to be more than poor wording on a website, a cl had their application refused because they got CB ESA ( in fact it may actually have been converted to NS ESA when the cl claimed UC?)
Since making the original post I have been in touch with the Dept for Education who yesterday confirmed that getting CBESA cannot be the sole cause of refusal.
This was in turn put to the Council and I am gratified to report that they immediately took responsibility and altered their website (and presumably the assessment criteria documents they use as well).
It may be that there were a number of claimants who have been wrongly refused free school meals because the assessors were not applying the right criteria and I would hope that the Council will be doing some sort of trawl to find them.
As far as I can see the rules have not changed for some years so it is possible that the Council may have to revisit a significant number of claims and there is of course no way of knowing how many people might have been put off claiming because of the wording on the website.
It may be that other Councils have had the same policy ( perhaps they all get information from the same source?) and I would be interested to know if anyone has spotted this
It may be that other Councils have had the same policy ( perhaps they all get information from the same source?) and I would be interested to know if anyone has spotted this
Well done Pete!
Out of interest when I first saw this thread, I did a quick google of the council’s wording to see if there was an obvious source. All that I saw were several Cornish schools which had presumably copied the council’s wording - perhaps the council would now be in a position to follow up to them?
Just for eg, this one still says:
If you are claiming the benefits listed below you are not eligible for free school meals. This is regardless of what other benefits/credits are being claimed.
Working Tax Credit
Contribution-Based Job Seeker’s Allowance and/or Contribution-Based Employment and Support Allowance