Facepalm: The Tories are ending their special fund for free meals in the smallest infant schools
TORIES SNATCH KIDS MEALS
The Tories are quietly ending a free school meals fund which has paid out more than £32 million.
Special cash grants for nearly 3,000 of the smallest infant schools will not be renewed at the end of next month - forcing them to raid other parts of their budgets.
Bonus funding helped infant schools with fewer than 150 pupils meet David Cameron 's pledge to provide free hot meals for every pupil.
The schools, many of them in rural areas, needed extra cash because their size meant they could not buy bulk food cheaply enough to fit their budgets. Read more: Row continues over children being asked to walk three miles to school after South Lanarkshire Council change free transport limits
But the grant worth well over £3,000 per school in 2014/15 was scaled back to a flat fee of £2,300 this year - and is now being axed altogether.
Officials said the fund was always meant to be transitional - but Shadow Children's Minister Sharon Hodgson said: "Once again David Cameron’s rhetoric doesn’t match the reality." All smiles: Free school meals for all infant pupils were a Tory pledge
"His Government is undermining his own pledge to hard-working parents and their children, who were promised a healthy and nutritious meal at school to help them learn," she continued.
In October the PM told the shadow minister he would keep universal infants' school meals, saying: "I am proud of what we have done, and we will be keeping it."
She said: "The Prime Minister stood up at the despatch box and committed his Government to protecting free school meals for all infants.
"A few short months later, the Department for Education has scrapped the help small schools receive to make free school meals for infants viable.
"School budgets are already under a lot of pressure with rising costs and shrinking budgets. Small schools are often especially hard pressed.
"The Prime Minister should act to ensure the education of children, and the financial viability of small schools is not at risk."
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PM pledge: But Labour claims schools will have to raid other parts of their budgets
In 2014/15 the fund paid out £3,000 or more for each small school, plus a per-pupil supplement depending on the school's size. The funding was initially set at £22.5m.
In 2015/16 the fund paid out a flat fee of £2,300 to 2,867 schools, coming to £6.5m in total.
Although these figures come to £29million, the Department for Education said a total of £32.5m was spent through the scheme.
A Department for Education spokesman said: "To help small schools with the transition to universal infant free school meals, we paid them an extra £32.5million over two years – over and above the £600million we have spent on the policy as a whole so far.
"We have always been clear that this funding was always intended to be temporary to help small schools to put their meals service on a more sustainable footing.
"We know that schools around the country used the funding to rise to the challenge and are providing hot meals to infants at lunchtime, something that has been proven to aid concentration and attainment and is part of our drive for educational excellence everywhere."
