Is your local authority missing its "hidden cohort" for free school meals?

In this episode, Joe sits down with Myles Bremner (Bremner & Co.) who has spent over a decade at the heart of school food policy. They confront the "crazy bureaucracy" standing between children and free school meals, and share how working with teams in Devon and Tower Hamlets has already put £12 million in pupil premium funding back into schools across the UK.

What you’ll learn:

• The Hidden Cohort: How to identify the thousands of eligible pupils currently missing out on vital support.
• The £12 Million Impact: Why fixing the registration process for free school meals is the fastest way to secure pupil premium funding.
• The September Deadline: Navigating upcoming changes to transitional protection and what they mean for your Local Authority.
• Data as a Force for Good: How local data officers are cutting through red tape to automate enrolment.
• Partnership Wins: Why honest conversations between councils and schools deliver more than working in silos.

Take Action on FSM: How is your team preparing for the policy changes this September? We are currently helping a select cohort of Local Authorities automate their FSM systems.

Explore the FSM Hub: https://basis.co.uk/free-school-meals/

Stay connected:

• Follow Joe on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joseph-badman
• Read the latest chapters from our upcoming book: https://relationalservicedesign.com
• Master the methodology: https://basistraining.co.uk/
• Partner with us: https://basis.co.uk

Okay, thanks for joining me, Myles.

Thank you very much, Joe, for having me.

So we're going to talk about why we're working together. We're going to talk at length about policy contacts around free school meals and water enrollment for free school meals.

We'll get into all of that stuff. But we've been working together for a few years now. But I don't actually know your background up until this point.

So what's the journey been until till now?

Slightly eclectic, but I've ended up running a small food policy consultancy called Bremner and Co. I've got a brilliant small team and we love working on solving issues around getting better food into people's mouths.

And we do lots of work with children's food and we work mostly with charities and NGOs and lots of work with local government.

Before that, I used to work for government and I was asked to oversee all of the school food policies that happened like a decade ago in something called the School Food Plan.

So I had the role of sort of overseeing what was then the implementation of free school meal policy and school food standards and free school meal registrations. This kind of is a recurring theme. Right, yeah. So 10 years ago I was on the government side doing.

Doing all of that government decided to shut the quango, the office or whatever, then went to work for Jamie Oliver, which was incredible. And then he does need the surname. Just Jamie. Yeah, just. And then, you know, set up working for me to start with.

And then over the years have had the honor and the pleasure of being able to work, you know, with more and more people and now with a brilliant partnership with basis.

Yeah, so let's talk about that. We started working together about three years ago in Tower Hamlet.

Yeah.

Do you want to pick up that thread? Why we came together in the first place?

Yeah. So I had been asked by Tower Hamlets to help advise on their school food policies and practices.

And the mayor had set out an incredible ambition that actually Tower Hamlets was going to be the first council in the UK to give free school meals for all secondary school kids. Right. So primary school has had good progress over the last decade in universal free school meals.

And actually Ty Hamlets had been funding free school meals for all primary school kids, but not secondary schools. And so I was there as an advisor working across the council.

And one of the first meetings with all the head teachers of all the 20 or so secondary schools in Town Hamlets, head teacher said, brilliant, but how might this affect our free school meal registrations? Because actually, if we don't register our Kids for free school meals. We're going to.

We got the jeopardy of losing out on important funding associated with free school meals.

And so I had come across this scheme of local Count, a local council, Sheffield, sort of deciding to go through this process which we'll come onto called local auto enrollment or opt out auto award or auto enrollment. There are lots of phrases for it.

But the point is, TA Hamlet said, okay, let's actually not only deliver brilliant free food for all secondary school kids, but actually make sure that all kids who are entitled to it are able to be registered.

And so TA Hamlet's approached you basis because you, as I've got to know you, you are brilliant at sorting out messy, complex challenges in councils and delivering successfully. And we worked together and achieved what was and still is an incredible result in terms of the first timelets did this opt out auto award.

824 Kids who previously were entitled to free school meals, but for all sorts of reasons were not registered, the magic happened and they were identified and registered and were able to receive their free school meals. So the kind of output is.

Not only were we able to assuage the fears of headteachers at that first meeting who said we might miss out on our current free school meal kids, that didn't happen. Actually, an additional cohort of kids that those schools had not been able to identify were found and then registered.

Yeah.

I mean, because it is a very legitimate concern for headteachers to have, because were families not to register, then the school wouldn't get Pupil premium funding, which is varies to a certain extent, but around about £1,400 is kind of what we're talking about, I think, isn't it? Per pupil, Is that about right?

Yeah. So, look, all public policy is complicated, I have to say. Free school meal policy is the most weirdly complex world that, that I've ever come across.

And the fact that free school meals are a proxy for schools to be able to receive disadvantaged funding and the various streams of disadvantage like Pupil Premium, there's a funding line in the funding formula called FSM EVER6, which is an additional one.

What that all means is that for every free school meal child that is registered, not only does the school receive the money to feed the kids, right, £500 a year to do that, but there's also £1,500 in pupil premium and then another kind of thousand pounds or so in other disadvantaged funding. So whilst a lot of the publicity around local auto enrollment talks about £1,500 per child, it's actually £3,000. It's a lot. It's a lot riding on it.

So not only did we manage to avoid the concerns that had teachers were raising, but we actually managed to find enormous amount of pupils that really should have been receiving it before, but for whatever reason their parents hadn't signed them up to receive it. I mean, maybe that's something worth touching on.

Just from our work and our research around why families aren't, aren't signing up, what are some of the reasons that families aren't or historically who've been eligible but haven't signed up?

Yeah. Government do not collect figures on how many children are entitled to free school meals. And that means they live in households under £7,400.

That's called benefits related or income related free school meals. Government used to track the figures of under registration and it used to be 11% right around the country. Some councils were better than others.

But it's clear that from the introduction of universal free school meals and in the early years of primary school, so when you're 4, 5, 6, 7, you're years old, that the fact that any kid can just turn up to school and get free school meal, the sort of relevance for parents to go out of their way to undertake a complex administrative task in registering for free school meals is, is sort of, that impetus is taken away, you know, that, that why would they do it if they just need to have free school meals? So schools have had to work really hard at working with their families to say, we think your kids might be eligible for free school meals.

If they are, please please register. And schools do a herculean task in being able to identify and work with families to get those entitled kids to be registered.

The fact is, for a multitude of reasons, not least the burdensome administration process that accompanies that, it means that many families do not get their kids registered. So definitely stigma is an issue. Right. So why would you want to come forward and say reveal your income sort of circumstances to a school?

It can be one of difficulty for families. I think another complex matter is around our most vulnerable children and most vulnerable and disadvantaged households have really complex lives.

And so, you know, many may we have found from this opt out auto enrollment that many of the newly identified households come from lone parent households or where English is an additional language. These are our most vulnerable families and children.

And so that the matter of having to go through complex paperwork, it's no wonder that many children have been falling through the cracks.

So Since Tower Hamlet, we've worked with four other local authorities now, including a two tier local authority in Devon and lots of other complexity there related to the two tier system. So it's been a priority over the past few years for people to figure this out for the reasons we're describing here.

But all of a sudden some policy changes nationally mean that, that, that now is really a crunch moment where people need to, to figure this out.

Yeah.

So John, talk a little bit about that.

So the Labour government have declared that they want to focus on children's health and wellbeing and recognize that investing in children's wellbeing and how health give them the best start in life is, is going to be good in the long term for UK PLC and long term productivity as well as good, happy, healthy lives. And so it's brilliant to see the work that government have done, particularly over the last few months in addressing inequalities in the system.

So the recent Child Poverty Task Force published it, its strategy, the headline was the removal of the 2 cap limit on benefits. But also within that was the commitment to increase the number of children who are going to be entitled for free school meals.

So from September, all children living in households who in receipt of universal credit are going to be entitled to free school meals. That is amazing. That's incredible. That's going to be a game changer.

In fact, in some more disadvantaged boroughs and wards and neighborhoods and schools in this country that's going to mean 75, 80% of the pupils in that school are going to be able to receive free school meals. So that's great.

We got to be able to identify those children and be able to find them kind of understandably because of the way that school finance work, it works a year in arrears, the new cohort of children are not going to have the same scheme as the existing benefits related free school meals. So government is introducing another free school meal grant scheme.

So that means there are going to be three free school meal grant schemes is where it gets complicated.

But the benefits related free school meals, which as I said earlier, attracts all the additional disadvantage funding. That's called transitional protections. All kids on transitional protections.

We don't know how many there are but it's, you know, it's probably well over Half a million. They're going to move from the existing benefits related scheme to this new universal, it's called expanded FSN scheme.

I work a lot on school food policy and practice. I'm really confused myself. Right. And, and government is working up the guidance and the processes and stuff like that.

We're hearing it's going to be in April, but there's not a lot of time for councils and schools to say, how do we work out with all these different free school meal schemes, the swapping over of kids from one scheme to another, the fact that actually it's not easy to get families to literally tick boxes to say yes.

How on earth do we, you know, get a process in place that we can identify all those children and then say to schools, these are your kids who are entitled for the respective free school meal schemes. You now can go and register those.

And that's why building on the work of Tar Hamlets and Devon and Bexley and Southwark and, and you know, the existing new council, Torbay, Gloucestershire Oxfordshire, is brilliant. These councils who are, have decided to, you know, bring the teams together and work out how to implement this opt out.

Now is the time that actually councils and schools need to work out how to find these kids, how to work out which bucket they're in and register them. And that's where this, in a program of opt out auto award that basis And Bremner do we know from our work with councils that it's successful?

We know that we're able to really delve into the data and the databases legally, safely and with success.

Yeah, I mean it really is a crunch moment because there are potentially an enormous amount more children that could be registered, but only if they can be identified.

And there are also a big cohort of children that who have previously been benefiting, could stop from benefiting from the support that they've been receiving. So now is kind of the moment to figure this out.

I think lots of people are confused about what this process is though, what we mean by opt out auto enrolment. Do you want to speak a little bit to that and then maybe I can talk about why, why it's challenging to do it in practice.

Yep, definitely. So what is opt out auto award, free school meal, auto enrollment? That in itself is a bit of a mouth. Okay.

So currently, as I said, parents literally have to tick a box to say, I give the school permission to go and see whether we're entitled to free school meals. Right, that's. That, that's. It's an opt in mechanism.

At the moment, the opt out auto award, at its most simple is a process by which the Council accesses benefits information, live benefits information normally held by dwp.

And there are a number of different databases, but predominantly it's going to be this universal credit database and they can identify through that database and cross reference it with all the children who are currently registered free school meals and then the children who are left.

Then the council and the schools work out a way to write to those parents and say, look, we understand that your child or children are entitled to free school meals, but we don't believe they are registered.

We as a council with the statutory obligation of tackling inequalities and public task, are going to do a check for you because that is in the best interest of the child and you and we want to give you the opportunity of telling us that you don't want us to do that, but if we don't hear from you within a period of time, we are going to proceed. And it's normally done by letters to households.

The incredible thing is that less than 1% of households ever get in contact with the council and of that 1%, like 3/4 of that 1% are because there's been an admin error or the child is too young or actually the parent says I don't want my child to eat the meal, they have a packed lunch because know they might have a allergen or something. So the opt out mechanism works really effectively.

It really helps target all children and then the information of all the children, each respective school is sent to the school and done that right at the beginning of the process. It's really important to get the GDPR and the permissions and the data use. Right?

Yeah.

So this is what I wanted to get into because just listening to what you've said there, of course I'm intimately familiar with this, but the thing people will be wondering about is, is that a legitimate, safe legal use of this data.

So the process of doing that is individual to every council and we work very, very closely with their Data Protection Officer and the legal department. But perhaps you can talk about the sort of legal basis for this.

But it's really important to sort of say to councils. The actual process is not too complex, there are lots of stages to go through and each and every council does things differently.

But the gathering, the certainty of acting in that process is really important. And that is where the nitty gritty around that legal basis to be able to do this is fundamentally important.

Our work at Bremner Co, we've worked very closely across DWP and DFE and with many other councils, local government association and lots of lawyers to help really understand the intricacies of the legal basis by which councils, as a statutory body, actually do have not only the right to be able to access benefits data for the purposes of identified children, but actually a duty to do so as well.

And as part of our work, and many times of going through this, we now have a really good framework and templates of legal rationale and the way in which councils will prepare their business case or data protection impact assessment.

Different councils have different names for it, but in order to satisfy the lawyers and the GDPR and the Senior Data officer that actually, not only is this okay to do, but it's the right thing to do, it can still get to some roadblocks with some individual people.

But actually, when you are able to lay out logically and legally the basis we have found in all of our councils we've worked with, that actually you can get through that process, and then that provides the real bedrock for all of the process side of. Of the activity to then happen.

Yeah, maybe it's.

Maybe it's worth talking a little bit about the process side of the activity, because I think the challenge with this as a project is different to the challenge we faced when we started working in Tower Hamlets. Although Sheffield had gone before us, we were still trying to figure out, literally, how is this feasible? Legally, how is this feasible?

And it was a process that required an enormous amount of feedback and testing assumptions and navigating our way through the fog together.

But having been through that process in Tow Hamlets and then subsequently worked in Southwark and then in several other places, we're not dealing with the same kind of challenge anymore. We know what the right answer is.

There are a few different ways that in practice, it works in different authorities, depending on how they're set up, depending on the roles and responsibilities that they have in place. But there is a correct. There is a correct answer.

Now, the problem is it's a very complicated project to run because of the variety of stakeholders that are involved and the time frames around which that you need to do the work.

I mean, technically you can do this at any point in the year, but really you need to galvanize people around the time where school census is happening, because schools are gearing up to doing this work around that time.

And everybody that's involved in this process is slightly nervous about it because we're dealing with data protection issues, we're dealing with legal basis for doing something that they might feel uncomfortable with. And everybody has got a sort of small role in the process.

And somehow you've got to figure out, how do we bring this group of people, ordinarily don't work together around the table and get them moving very, very quickly to put this process into place.

And I think the thing that we were able to establish very successfully in Tower Hamlets and have subsequently been able to establish in other councils, is to work in a much more agile way, which is not very familiar to the organizations that we're working in, which in practice just means bringing together a small team of people making concrete progress and demonstrating that progress both to the organization and to other stakeholders, and then together deciding, okay, we've made this progress, what are the next steps and what are the next steps?

And I think that lots of councils that have, many councils, have now subsequently done this for themselves, and I think that is perfectly, perfectly feasible.

But I think where lots of people are getting stuck is there's quite a lot of complexity around the legal and data protection side of things, which can complicate the project.

And because there are so many stakeholders involved, it's just really difficult to get the project unstuck and get it moving and get it in place and manage the communications with schools and with all the various departments involved. Am I being fair there? Does that sound like a reasonable description of the challenge and the situation?

Yeah, and I think there are, across the projects we've worked on, I think there's some really important kind of principles of approach that come out. One is around senior sponsorship.

Yeah.

And we found that through our commissions with councils, we're able to help guide at project setup to really ensure that buy in from a senior leader who then has the ability and the mandate to be able to quickly resolve blockages when they occur. And they always do occur, you know, because it's a new process with teams that are being brought together. I think secondly is.

And critically alongside that senior sponsorship is this, why are we doing it? So this real clarity is actually very simply, it's about ensuring that fairness and equity.

And again, part of the communications work we do with the project group in the very early days is to really galvanize that sense of, we are doing this because it is the right thing to do. And then. And then I think thirdly, what we are bringing to the commissions is experience and knowledge and ways of how to deliver this.

And each and every time we do this, we. We're learning all the time as well in a fast moving Policy landscape.

So Brett, our, I think our contribution at Bremner and Co is we have a pretty good finger on the pulse in terms of what's going on in policy and the legal and the, you know, stuff. And so we're able to bring that, but also bring the experiences of, you know, the second county council we worked with.

We were able to lean on the experiences of working with the first, you know, county council we worked with and so on and so on. No one process is the same.

And that's really important to note because every council has different dynamics between different teams, whether that's public health, education, education teams, finance schemes, the way it engages with schools.

But because we have a keen sense of the principles and the ways to deliver this project where I hope we're able to quickly, you know, galvanize and gain the trust and confidence of the council, you know, the client, but then also the project team.

And for me, the joy of seeing, you know, the basis team project doing the project management and the joy and love of working on this project to me is just so palpable.

Well, that's very kind of you to say.

And I think there's been a really fantastic partnership between us that we in isolation, neither of us, I don't think could have had the impact that we've had. I've been working in local government for a long time now, for 16 years.

And in all of that time, the biggest challenges have been so complex that there is almost never an obvious answer or a clear route forward, a solution that you can implement and it will result in predictable outcomes. Just those things don't exist.

And the way I describe this intervention is it's kind of a little bit of a unicorn that if you put this in place, it's not easy, but it has, at least in our experience to date, resulted in pretty predictable outcomes in the authorities that we've worked in. Really significant numbers of kids in a variety of different contexts, really significant amounts of funding going into schools.

So I think they're four kind of impact areas that, that, that, that opt out auto enrollment workers uncovering number one. And obviously, as you were saying, is the numbers right? It's, it's pretty material.

When Stefan finds well over a thousand kids who just were not in the system, they were entitled to the system. They come from the poorest, most disadvantaged households, but they just weren't in the system. They're now in the system. Right.

And that not only is are those kids going to be able to have a free school meal saving their families over 500 that the school is getting another two and a half thousand per pupil to support disadvantage funding. So that's really important.

Secondly, this new cohort are now going to be able to take advantage of other funding that the council or schools might make available because of free school meals, trips, uniforms, household support fund, you know, all these sort of really important kind of tangible, practical support right now.

Thirdly, we're hearing from councils that actually bringing together different teams together and working in this agile way of working is actually getting the council to think, well, hang on, what ways are there for us to look at our ways of working to be more agile and nimble and responsive to policy opportunities?

And then, and probably the most important impact of all, but longer term, is from a public health lens and perspective, the role of councils and the role of local government in enabling and supporting better equity and tackling inequalities obviously came to the fore during COVID of course, but I think that what this does is with a thousand new households of the most disadvantaged children, what.

And how can a council really begin to understand what wider policies that it can leverage, either from national policies or local policies, to really start to understand how to support those families to really, you know, ensure better outcomes for them and their kids?

So perhaps it'd be useful if you just talk through what does this project look like, what does a commission look like from sort of start to finish?

So normally what happens is that we will have a number of introductory conversations with the council and that may have been instigated by different teams within the council, public health or head of children's services, or from the sort of CEO's office, saying, we, we've, you know, want to explore this. We sort of quickly work up the.

The rationale and the opportunities and support the council with a business case and the return on investment that can be achieved with the council's investment and their value for communities and for schools.

So then the project is commissioned and we get going and we have kickoff meetings where we advise the initial and work with initial contact to start, bringing all of the respective individuals and teams that come need to come together, but then also sort of work out what a call core, smaller team might look like within the council. So we have regular, often weekly checkered.

And that looks different in different councils, doesn't it?

Very different in different councils. But so basically, what am I saying? We get the governance and project admin all set up, you know, so everyone's comfortable.

We then look at the legals, right, getting the permission to do this, get that really embedded. And alongside that, work out the high level communications about why we're doing this, why it's important.

We then have the respective streams of activity of where do we get the data from, how do we crunch that data, how do we match the data, how do we start looking at the communications with schools? Quite a lot of those streams of works, plates spinning, let's call it, they happen concurrently.

But as a team, we, we work alongside the council project team to make sure that all of those activities are happening, that the dependencies, everyone understands, if there's a blockage quickly go through, we work with the senior sponsor. So we then work with you to deliver it. Right.

And then critically, and I think really successfully, that towards the end of the project, we will work with the council to make sure that there's a real clear roadmap map and documentation for the whole council, not just one individual or just one department, but actually the process, so that it can then be a process that is owned by the council and embeds itself into its business as usual. So the joy, I think, of all of our commissions is that every single council is carried on with this work and, and, you know, entire hamlets.

That was three years ago, they're now doing it all the time. Southwark and now, I think Southwark are now looking at doing it, if not terminally, then even monthly checks.

Yeah.

And they've really embraced it as a business as usual. So, in summary, we work with you to get the governance right and the hearts and minds right.

We do sort out all the legals, we do the process with you, but then we leave you with that real clear roadmap so that you can own it and carry on with delivering it.

Yeah.

And just having spoken with the team recently, I know that Devon immediately been able to embed the process within their teams, have run the process for themselves and I think have found another 300 or so children and young people.

I think one thing that some councils will be thinking is that perhaps their data management in some cases won't be as mature as they would like it to be.

We've seen a variety of different circumstances where people have got really comprehensive data sets, big teams of folks that are there and can help cross reference the data and identify children and families.

And in other cases we've found councils that are much earlier in the journey and are still sort of keeping some information in spreadsheets and have got smaller teams, but we've been able to find a way in all of those circumstances to identify children.

So I think even, even if my encouragement, I suppose, is even if you think, well, actually it's going to be a real nightmare for us to be able to match these data sets together by hook or by crook. We've found a way of doing that in all different circumstances, each and every time.

Right, so it is data in a database, what that database looks like, how it's construed, what data it has in it.

We have seen all sorts, the names of the different data sets and databases, whether it's held by the council or whether it's, you know, commissioned out to a third party data provider.

There's all sorts of different ways in which all of that is managed and we've worked with, you know, a whole plethora of different ways and I'm sure our future commissions are going to throw up new different, different ways, but it comes back to the principles of, of approach and the way that basis you work in that agile sort of way of saying, right, you know, okay, we got these two bits of information, they got to be, you know, plug together.

I am bowled over by the ingenuity and the creativity and the determination of data offices in councils and the way that they are able to, you know, meld things together that you just couldn't possibly, you know, think, think that happens it in the ideal world. It makes you realize, why the hell does paperwork and poor admin get in the way of kids getting a free school meal?

It shouldn't actually be this difficult, should it? But you know, what this process does is start making it less difficult and helping that data flow become more seamless.

So Joe, as you know, there's a lot going on in the world of school food at the moment and government have announced that from this September that is increasing the number of kids who are going to be entitled for free school meals. This is brilliant news.

Within that simple announcement, there's actually some real complicated policy contexts where there's going to be more children entitled, but a whole heap of other children who are currently entitled for one form of free school, males who are going to be moving on to this new form of free school meals, which means that councils and schools are going to have to work really hard to work out how to swap everyone who needs to swap everyone over and how to identify everyone who's entitled to free school meals.

So, so this is great. There's this huge opportunity, but there's also some real jeopardy in this, I suppose, isn't there?

So the, the jeopardy is that in the brilliant policy intention that kids miss out, we've been working With a number of councils on this opt out auto award process, which ultimately brings all the different teams from councils and schools together to ensure that all children who are entitled to free school meals are identified and registered for those free school meals. It kind of is a process as simple as, as that, albeit with lots of, you know, things that have to be done and processes and legal basis.

Our role as basis and Bremner working in the councils is to make sure that councils can do this successfully. It's now going to look at my watch beginning of February, we got until September to get this done.

We know that the project can be delivered in, in, in around three months or so, but we urge and hope that councils are going to understand that now is a brilliant opportunity to really understand how to get things ready to take maximum advantage of this brilliant free school meal policy.

So it's really crucial that this gets resolved by September so that the new children that are eligible are identified and do get access to the additional funding and support that comes with being registered for free school meals or benefits related free school meals. But it's also really crucial because of the children that are on the previous arrangements, transitional protection is coming to an end.

So I think this is something that lots of people will be familiar with, but for those who aren't, can you just speak to this because it's really crucial.

Yeah. So one policy is extending the number of kids who can get free school meals.

Another policy which is this end of transitional protection is going to move a whole cohort of pupils who are currently receiving income related or benefits related free school males onto this new free school meal threshold. Those children need to be deregistered and re registered.

And that's the point is that we've, we've got to not only find the new children who are entitled for free school meals, but we've got to swap over those children who are moving from transitional protections where because of their household income, they're not going to be entitled anymore for benefits related free school meals, but they are going to be entitled for this new free school meals.

It's really complicated but, you know, it is going to have to happen and that is why this auto enrollment process delivers, you know, the process that ensures that all children are identified and which free school meal scheme they need to be on so that councils can then help their schools to register them in the correct way.

Yeah.

So regardless of the challenge we're addressing, either ensuring we identify all the new kids that are that are eligible or ensuring that those who are already receiving it Continue to receive it. This, this process that we're talking about, it sort of addresses both of those challenges in, in one hit, really, doesn't it?

Yeah.

And going back to, you know, our first story with Tower Hamlet is and flush out those children who are just hidden and were never seen in the first place. And they are our most vulnerable children and families.

So it's, you know, opt out auto enrollment processes is a win for children and families because it means that they will be entitled to free school meals and save the household income.

It's a win for schools because, you know, for the income related free school meals, the school will continue to receive benefits, sorry, disadvantaged funding like pupil Premium.

And it's a win for councils because it helps just streamline the process that actually starts playing to the wider role that councils have in tackling inequalities and supporting their communities.

So this year, different to the last couple of years, actually, we've started to have conversations with councils who were very, very confident a couple of years ago in their process for identifying as many children as possible, but who are now realizing that perhaps there are still an enormous amount of children that just haven't been picked up.

And I think what's at the heart of this challenge, and perhaps you can talk to this, is that many councils have got incredibly sophisticated processes for getting families to opt in.

But there is a significant difference, at least from our experience, in the number of children that become identified when you move to an opt out process, regardless of how sophisticated the process is. Would that be a fair description of the.

Completely fair.

And, and I think that because councils have, you know, well established processes and relationships between schools and the admissions team and the free school meals sort of reg admissions process, which relies on, as you said, this opt in, then changing to this opt out is, you know, requires a different mindset and, you know, those existing processes probably are being run as well and as efficiently as they can. The point is, no matter how well run they are, children and families are falling through the cracks.

And what this opt out auto award does is, is because you are going to the source data of benefits data, you are identifying those families.

Yeah. And we're not talking about identifying a couple of extra families, we're talking in some cases about identifying several hundred.

Several hundred, yeah. So, Jo, we've now worked with six councils having completed the projects. Tell me about the numbers.

Yeah, so the numbers vary from place to place and of course, the size of those places make a real difference.

So even the councils have identified fewer pupils proportionately, reasonably similar across organisations, but in six councils and that includes two two tier authorities.

So in Gloucestershire and Devon, across six authorities we have identified 4,000 pupils thus far and indeed they are continuing to run the process and identifying more pupils as they go. So at first pass, 4,000 pupils. And if you just looked at pupil premium funding alone, that's £4.6 million going into schools.

But if you take into account all the additional funding that you talked about earlier, about 3,000 pounds per pupil, so about 12 million pounds worth of additional funding going towards families from, you know, with disadvantaged backgrounds. Which is, yeah, pretty, pretty astonishing really, isn't it?

Really astonishing. And actually that's not 12 million quid as a one off, that's actually £12 million every year.

Yeah, really.

So if you're looking at having identified a child early in primary school, that's for the next 10 years of schooling. Makes a difference, right?

Really does, yeah, yeah. And when you put it in those terms, or indeed when I put it in those terms, it's quite astonishing.

But yeah, I think the thing that I was really proud to hear recently was an anecdote relayed back to us by the team of people working on these projects from Moira Marder, who's the chief executive officer of the TED Rag Trust.

She's one of, and who championed Devon to, you know, come and talk to us to get, yeah, us to help Devon deliver the project.

Yeah, she really is one of our, one of our greatest champions. I'm very, very grateful for her support.

But she was, I think having her eyebrows done and just in conversation, the, the lady that was doing her eyebrows mentioned that she'd just found out that her two young children were going to be able to have free school meals. She didn't realize it was a thing. She didn't realize she was entitled to it.

And just in passing, just mentioned just how much of a difference that made to her and you know, her family life, really. And that's just one family.

And it's pretty, pretty wonderful really, to think that small impact is happening right across the country in all of these families. And I'm sure you feel the same. Something that I've been very proud of these last couple of years is the work that we've done.

We're not doing a process that is trying to scam the system. We're not. Notwithstanding the legal headaches that many councils and, and we have had to battle through. Right.

Sometimes you're kind of going, we're not doing anything unfair here, actually. We're trying to tackle fairness in, in the system.

These are all children who are entitled to free school meals, but by want of crappy paperwork and poor administration and confusing policy and the stigma around registrations are falling through the cracks.

And this, you know, opt out auto award project that we've had the honor, I think, of being involved in over the last few years is really helping to just tackle through that crazy bureaucracy and just, you know, just to make sure that the kids who already should be getting it are getting it.

Yeah. I mean, children having nutritious meals consistently every day is, should be just the foundation of a progressive society.

And, and this, this process, it's not the sexiest thing in the world, is, is, is one way of, of moving towards, towards that. So how can people find out more about our work?

So what we love doing at Bases and Bremner is talking to councils and over the last couple of years we've held lots of webinars and we've been invited to speak at webinars held by local government association and other organizations. We're actually doing our own set of webinars and we've got a couple coming up. Get in touch with Basis and Bremner. Look at LinkedIn. We're there.

We love talking about this. Actually our councils we've worked with love talking about this as well.

So we hope there's good routes for all councils, whatever team you're in, to come and start having a conversation with us and that we can quickly engage with you. We know the time pressure is on for, for this September, but we're having lots of great conversations with councils now.

We really hope and would love to have conversations with more of you too.

Brilliant. I think that's a good place to leave it. Thanks, Miles.

Thanks, Joe.