Schools miss out on free meals funding

Figures show that of the 56 schools which applied to the Department for Education from the region only five were successful.

This means that bids for more than £2.5m of funding missed out. The Department for Education said the main purpose of the extra funding was to ensure all schools could receive hot meals. A spokesman said that all schools which proved they could not provide hot food had received extra cash.

However this has been challenged by a campaigner who is questioning how public money is being spent on the universal infants free school meal (UIFSM) policy.

School governor Andy Jolley said that when the additional funding was first announced in a letter to schools last year the DfE did not say that its main aim was to ensure schools could provide hot food.

Providing free school meals to children up to the age of seven was announced by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg at the Liberal Democrat party conference in 2013 and came it into affect at the start of the current academic year.

However there has been ongoing controversy over how the policy was costed and the impact it is having on schools and councils’ budgets. Before the start of the new school the Local Government Association suggested that the £150m provided by the DfE would leave a shortfall of more than £25m. In October last year Schools Minister David Laws announced another £20m was being provided to allow more capital work on school kitchens to be carried out. Last week The Yorkshire Post reported that all four schools from Mr Clegg’s home city of Sheffield which applied for this extra funding missed out - with the city council having to find £400,000 from its own budget. A spokesman for the Lib Dem leader said that parents and taxpayers would be amazed that the vity’s Labour Council did not make better use of the initial £1.2m funding schools were given.

The city was one of five education authority areas in Yorkshire where no schools bidding were successful.

In Bradford 14 schools submitted bids totalling more than £1m. In Leeds there were nine schools which were unsuccessful -having bidded for more than £1m. Six schools in Barnsley and one school in York were also unsuccessful. Coun Ralph Berry, Bradford Council’s executive member for children’s services said: “These figures are appalling. Schools and councils are having to absorb these costs from their own budgets. If they had come to local authorities in the first place we could have delivered a programme scheme. What we are left with is schools sorting out the complex legacy of what was a vanity project.”

Two schools in the East Riding and three in North Yorkshire did receive extra support.

However another 15 in the East Riding and another in North Yorkshire missed out. A spokeswoman for East Riding Council said: “We submitted applications for 17 schools against the criterion set by the government. In January 2015, the council was delighted to be advised that we had been successful with two of our bid applications - Barmby on the Marsh and Swinefleet Primary.” The schools in North Yorkshire which were successful were Rossett Acre Primary in Harrogate, Roecliffe Primary near Boroughbridge and Sharrow Primary, near Ripon.