2. Delegation Process
This is where your responsibilities can conflict as a governor. We are stretched, we need to find
every penny that we can. I can imagine a situation with my finance committee saying ‘Hang
on, it’s up to these people to make their claim, look after their children’, because anything that
does not go in that direction, remains in the budget to cater for what is a really, really tight
year.......
So yes I’m not too upset if there is a little bit of money left in the budget because some children
haven’t taken up their meal. On the other hand if I thought that number was substantial then
I think we would have to rethink it and inform people. We are a Christian school and we have
an obligation to look after our children.
2.27 However there was also evidence that some schools were subsidising losses on the
provision of free school meal. One LEA officer was aware of schools in her authority
where the number of pupils taking free school meal exceeded the number on which
their delegated funding was calculated.
There are a few schools, probably about five or six, which do actually service more free meals
than they have the money for and what has surprised us is that these schools have not been
jumping up and down saying ‘We are not getting enough money’. In the primaries they are
probably a few hundreds of pounds short but in one secondary, they were several thousand
pounds short and I was surprised they weren’t chasing that.
2.28 A representative of a local Governors Association described the situation which had
arisen in their authority which had led to schools being out of pocket on free school
meals. The local area had experienced expanding residential development and the free
school meal budget did not accommodate rapid changes in village populations.
What it doesn’t take account of is external forces because it is almost entirely pupil driven. If
you get an expanding villageyou can finish up without the moneyyou require... Ifyou’ve got
a population shift within an areayou end up with mismatches.
2.29 One LEA, that had closed its paid meals service in 1991 addressed this problem by
giving retrospective top-ups to schools to cover changes in the free school meal take up.
This had been implemented because of the difficulties which had arisen in rural schools
which took in pupils from traveller families for short periods.
2.30 However, some LEAs reported no formal process for providing ‘top-ups’ and one case
study school had pursed this with the LEA. The free school meal budget, calculated on
the previous years take up of free school meal, had not covered the cost of the demand
in the current year. However there had been no reimbursement forthcoming.
2.31 A Schools Forum had played an active role in successfully recommending that free
school meal funding should remain central, arguing that the current situation worked
against schools trying to improve the take-up of free meals. A member of the Forum
expressed the view;
This is a social function in effect, not an education function and if all the entitlement is taken
up there isn’t enough money in the kitty. So one head in an underprivileged area said ‘This is
a nonsense, I want to build up, I want to encourage parents to take up free school meals. If I’ve
only got the allocation on previousyears take up, then I’ve got no incentive.’ We believe that
the free school meal budget should remain with the authority because in the long run the
authority has a statutory duty to fund it whether it’s got the money or not because it is a social
function- it’s got to find the money whatever. At the Schools Forum it was fairly unanimous
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