A change to the way Free School Meals (FSM) are administered in Torbay has resulted in more than 200 additional pupils being able to access them and an additional £300,000 being generated for schools in the Bay.

From this autumn academic term, Torbay Council has been working with local schools to ensure that more pupils who are entitled to FSM are able to access them, via auto-enrolment, and this has also resulted in thousands of pounds being made available to Torbay via the Pupil Premium scheme.

Existing Council data was matched with School Census information to identify children who were entitled to FSM but not yet registered, and schools needed to register identified pupils in time for the October school census.

Councillor Nick Bye, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services for Torbay Council, said: “We have moved to auto-enrolment, which means that pupils who are eligible are automatically enrolled unless their parents or carers choose to opt out, which they were given a deadline of 8 September to do. As soon as we identified the additional children we moved at pace to ensure they would get FSM without any further delay.

“This change has resulted in a further 234 pupils being able to access free school meals from this year, and has also attracted more than £300,000 extra pupil premium funding to Torbay’s education system. In future years we will be auto-enrolling as a routine process to make sure no child is left behind. We are also now looking at how we can extend this to Early Years settings such as nurseries.

“On behalf of Torbay Council, I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who was involved in getting this scheme up and running, staff and pupils at the school themselves and parents, as well as our own staff who worked hard to get this new process up and running.”