Extra school meals to ‘lift 100k pupils from poverty'

An extra half a million children will benefit from a free meal every school day after the government announced a major expansion of the policy, which they said would lift 100,000 pupils out of poverty and put an extra £500 in parents' pockets.

- MILLIE COOKE, JABED AHMED

From the start of the 2026 school year, every child whose household is on universal credit will be entitled to free school meals, the government announced today.

Since 2018, children have only been eligible for free school meals if their household income is less than £7,400 per year, meaning hundreds of thousands of children living in poverty have been unable to access them.

As of January last year, nearly 2.1 million children in England were eligible for free school meals. The Department for Education claimed that the expansion will lift 100,000 children across England out of poverty.

The decision comes two years after The Independent's Feed the Future campaign, in which we called for free school meals to be extended to all schoolchildren in England - both primary and secondary who lived in households on universal credit but missed out on free school meals.

The latest move will be seen as a major concession to Labour MPs who are concerned about the direction of the government, with rebellion brewing over the party's upcoming welfare cuts and calls for Sir Keir Starmer to scrap the two-child benefit cap.

The chancellor Rachel Reeves also announced yesterday that more people will get fuel payments "this winter” as she pledged to raise the level of the means test.