Free School Meals Eligibility Check
This system identifies children who are already entitled to free school meals from data we hold, so that their families do not need to make a separate application.
Keywords
- Tags: Data matching
- Tags: Take-up
- Tags: Education
- Tags: Automation
- Stage: Development
- Type: Deterministic rules with probabilistic record matching
- Sector: Education
- Language: English
How does our product work?
Entitlement itself is decided by published rules, not by a model. The only probabilistic step is deciding whether a benefit record and a school record describe the same household, where names, addresses and dates of birth may be recorded differently.
Matches below the confidence threshold are checked by a person. A family is never removed from free school meals by this system, only added.
Overview
A significant minority of eligible families never claim free school meals, most often because they do not know they qualify or find the application process difficult. The entitlement exists; the take-up does not follow.
Automatic enrolment turns a form into a notification. Families are told they have been enrolled and how to opt out.
Owner and responsibility
More detailed information on the system
Here you can get acquainted with the information used by the system, the operating logic, and its governance in the areas that interest you.
System description
The matching step is deliberately conservative: it is tuned to prefer sending a case to a human over making a confident wrong match, because a wrong match would disclose one family's circumstances in the context of another's.
An error in the direction of enrolling a child who is not eligible is treated as far less harmful than the reverse, and the thresholds reflect that.
References
Eligibility rules as published in statutory guidance.
Data protection impact assessment covering the benefit-to-school data match.