Response to Q&A feedback

Dear Parents/Carers

We have recently received feedback that communication around the free trip to the Big Swing and Free School Meals was not clear enough. In an endeavour to meet our 50% of the School/home partnership, we have reposted the definitions below, for your clarity:

Free School Meals (Definition)

DO I QUALIFY FOR HELP?

You can claim Free School Meals for any child who normally lives with you and who is classed as being under your parental care. To get Free School Meals you must receive one of the following benefits:

• Universal Credit (and your net combined household income is less than £7,400 a year after tax)
• Income Support, Pension Guarantee Credit, Income-based Job Seekers Allowance.
• Income-related Employment Support Allowance
• Child Tax Credit Only (With No Working Tax Credit) and your Annual Taxable Income does not exceed £16,190.

WHICH CHILDREN GET FREE SCHOOL MEALS?

You can claim Free School Meals if you have any children in your care who attend a non-fee paying school full-time. This includes Academies and Free Schools, those in the sixth form (except Notre Dame and Elliott Hudson Sixth Form Colleges), those attending Pupil Referral Units and Specialist Inclusive Learning Centres and those below Reception age who have full day places at nurseries attached to an LEA maintained school (that is they attend nursery both before and after lunch).

• If you qualify for any of the above please fill out the form below (It is on every class page under forms):

Application Form for Free School Meals

The following was on the School’s admissions form:

If you do not qualify, you are NOT FREE SCHOOL MEALS. However, children that are in reception, Year 1 or Year 2 then the below applies:

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Universal Free School Meal (Definition)

This is a government scheme. Universal infant free school meals (UIFSM) provides funding for all government funded schools to offer free school meals to pupils in reception, year 1, and year 2.

Schools and local authorities must follow the terms and conditions set out in the conditions of grant. (Gov.uk)

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/universal-infant-free-school-meals-uifsm-2022-to-2023

All the information above is on our website and is shown below:

Current Year 1 page:	Links and forms:
	If you have never filled this form out you are not classed as free school meals. However you may be receiving a Universal Free School Meal if your child is in Reception (EYFS), Year 1 or Year 2 as per stated above.

Our website is the single primary source of information for Cookridge Primary School. Our App links to this website and has the ability to send notifications to parents who have downloaded the App and selected the correct categories (These push notifications do not cost the school anything – where as other messaging services do). The decision for this is so that teachers and staff have one resource to update and not numerous individual platforms, which I am sure you will agree would take teachers unnecessarily away from planning, assessing and making your children’s education fun.

We also have the ability to see who has downloaded the App, who has read the notification and who has not and from this we can ascertain, those who are getting the notifications, how many are currently having problems and then pass this on to the App designers for technical assistance. There have been videos since the Pandemic offering technical assistance. For those that have missed these please see the below links:

https://www.cookridgeprimary.co.uk/
https://www.cookridgeprimary.co.uk/homepage/september-2022-new-starters/

In future, we will try to remember to put Universal Free School Meals or Free School Meals/Pupil Premium on all communication shared with yourselves.

We will be holding a workshop in September for Q&As for you to share any new ideas on how to continuously improve communication, so look out for the notification in September for those details.  

Kind regards

Cookridge