AQW 14639/22-27

Mr Nick Mathison
Alliance Party
Strangford

Tabled Date: 09/09/2024
Answered On Date: 16/09/2024
Priority Written: No

Question:
To ask the Minister of Education whether he will implement the recommendation in the departmentally commissioned report from Ulster University, Free School Meal Entitlement as an Indicator of Socioeconomic Deprivation in NI: Advantages, Disadvantages and Alternatives, to use Free School Entitlement over a three to six year period as the measure of Socio-Economic Deprivation.

Answer:

The Ulster University research report recommended that further investigation should be carried out into replacing the current/past year FSME measure with an expanded free school meal entitlement (FSME) measure such as FSME ever6, which measures if a pupil has been entitled to free school meals at any time over the last six years.

The Department collects information on FSME ever6 through the annual school census and is investigating how to collect FSME ever3. FSME ever6 will be available as a measure of socio-economic deprivation for policy officials who currently use FSME as an alternative indicator or to supplement other measures of deprivation to better target policies and programs.

Preliminary analysis indicated that changing to the FSME ever6 measure would increase the number of pupils considered in the allocation of funding for tackling educational disadvantage. Without an increase in funding available, such a change would expand the number of eligible children, thereby reducing the amount allocated per pupil.

Another limitation of FSME ever6 is that it is not available for most primary school children as they have not been in school for six years. In some cases, the use of ever6 could skew support towards older pupils and away from others such as newcomers.

For these reasons, it has been decided that the current/past year FSME measure is the most appropriate for the purposes of those policies/programmes. The Department will continue the practice of supplementing this measure, where feasible, with additional indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage.