For a variety of reasons, children do not always live and go to school in the same local authority area. However, where pupils attend school out of borough, the information required to assess their Free School Meals (FSM) eligibility is not automatically transferred between boroughs.

LOTI has therefore facilitated a pilot data sharing project working with four neighbouring boroughs to address this challenge. Anna Humpleby, LOTI Data Projects Manager, caught up with the borough leads for this project: Laura Stoker (Lambeth), Mia Polovina (Lewisham), Farihah Choudhury (Southwark) and Gary Hipple (Wandsworth).

Context

Local authorities have begun to adopt auto-enrolment approaches to free school meal uptake. In short, the process involves a local authority matching their school census data with housing benefit and council tax support data to identify potentially eligible, but not claiming, children and then writing to the households of those children indicating that they will be auto-enrolled unless they opt out.

The Challenge

Currently, the only households boroughs can identify as eligible through this process are children who live AND go to school in their local authority area. This is because the school borough maintains the school census data, but the home borough has the relevant household data.

This means there is a cohort of potentially eligible households that may be slipping through the cracks.

What we set out to achieve

Farihah: Through a health equality lens, we wanted to ensure that no child who was entitled to FSM was being left behind due to going to school in a different borough to where they live.

Laura: One of the challenges with auto-awarding Free School Meals is identifying children that live in one borough and attend school in another. We have been advocating for a solution to be able to change this and data share for the past few years to ensure equitable support for families attending school in the borough, regardless of where they live and to maximise the number of residents receiving this support. We also know children from Black and Asian backgrounds, as well as children from lone parent families, are less likely to claim Free School Meals and wanted to ensure we were responding to the equalities needs of our residents.

Gary: We want to ensure that we know all the children and families in our borough who are entitled to free school meals. We also want the home local authority of our out-of-borough children in our schools to know theirs. This ensures all our children and schools get the funding, benefits and support they are entitled to. Our internal auto-enrolment processes have been successful and having established that, this was a logical next step to find additional eligible children.

Methodology

We wanted to test this out using a fairly low-tech/resource approach to see how it worked in practice and whether it achieved the intended benefits.

What did this mean in practice?

• Boroughs produced an extract of their school census containing out-of-borough addresses and shared this into an access-restricted area.
• Borough extracts were then combined into a central repository ready for boroughs to run an internal match against their benefits data.
• This enabled boroughs to identify pupils who were residing in their borough, but attending school in one of the other 3 participating boroughs.
• The home borough of the identified pupils then contacted the households via letter as per the auto-enrolment approach.

The above was all facilitated by a data sharing agreement (DSA) specific to this pilot project between the participating boroughs.

What has been the impact of this work?

Mia: This project has shown how secure, well-governed and collaborative data sharing between local authorities can deliver clear and measurable benefits. By proactively identifying eligible children who attend out of borough schools, we’ve made access to Free School Meals more equitable and streamlined – reducing the administrative burden on families, supporting children’s wellbeing, and increasing funding for schools through the Pupil Premium. It demonstrates the power of data to support vulnerable families and highlights the value of cross-borough collaboration in delivering more efficient, joined-up public services. The approach provides a scalable model that other councils can adopt to improve outcomes at minimal cost.

Gary: We have shared our detailed processes amongst the participating local authorities and this has been informative in how best to harmonise data collection and processing practices. We have identified an additional 22 children resident in Wandsworth, attending schools out of borough. Furthermore we identified 55 children resident out of borough who attend our schools – so very worthwhile for us.

Farihah: We have identified 158 pupils who live in Southwark but attend school outside of Southwark to receive FSM.

Lessons and Reflections for other Local Authorities interested in this work

• Get data experts to discuss directly with each other – data fields for matching are really important!
• Sharing the data is possible, providing all partners are willing and able to commit time to the change
• Overcoming the data sharing barriers can have massive impacts for families and broaden the scope of support each council is able to provide for its most vulnerable residents
• Commit to it – it’s really worthwhile

What’s next?

This pilot project has had a really positive impact on free school meal uptake across the participating boroughs so there is a clear use case to roll this out more widely across London. Particularly in light of the government-announced free school meal expansion which will see even more families eligible for FSM from the 2026 school year.

This quote from Farihah really sums it up for me: “I found it surprising how many pupils were cross-borough. Having a DSA in place with at least one borough who shares a large border may have a surprising impact, helping pupils access FSM who have previously fallen through the cracks”.

This really demonstrates the value that this could have at the Pan-London level. LOTI is therefore exploring plans for a broader pilot, utilising existing data sharing infrastructure and a pan-London data sharing agreement on the sharing of school census data. The hope is that all London boroughs will eventually be able to participate in this approach. Stay tuned for more details!