The Bill includes practical and tangible policy reforms which will reduce the cost of the school day for all families but make the biggest difference to the 4.3 million children that are currently growing up in poverty.
What is the evidence on the impact of the benefit cap on children and families in poverty? In particular, how do high housing costs affect experiences of the cap and people's ability to escape it? And why is it so important that the government scraps the policy?
This short report looks at the challenges facing schools when implementing a means-tested school meal system, and the debt families are incurring for school meals in primary schools across England.
This briefing looks at free school meals (FSMs) in Yorkshire and the Humber, including new statistics on the number of children in poverty in each local authority missing out on this entitlement.
England has a much higher proportion of children in poverty who are ineligible for free school meals compared to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland but all nations can do more, new analysis from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) reveals.
Across the UK, millions of children receive a free school meal (FSM) each day at school. But many miss out. Previous CPAG analysis estimated that, across England, 900,000 school-age children in poverty (one in three school-age children) don’t qualify for a FSM under either the national universal infant provision or means-tested schemes. This new piece of analysis shows how this compares to national FSM schemes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The analysis also looks at how this figure is broken down by region in England.
This briefing shows how the benefit cap is contributing to homelessness, as families are trapped in refuges and other forms of temporary accommodation and are unable to move on to secure and affordable homes.
In line with inflation, today benefits are being uprated by 6.7 per cent. For the first time in four years, the local housing allowance has gone up, improving housing support for many private renters. But one group will not see any improvement in support at all: around 77,000 families are affected by the ‘benefit cap'.
