Ahead of eligibility being widened to include 500,000 additional schoolchildren, government has been urged by campaigners to implement automatic enrolment for pupils that will soon qualify for a free lunch

Whitehall departments are working together to explore the possibility that children could be automatically enrolled for free school meals as part of the claims process for Universal Credit.

From September of next year, children across England that live in a household in receipt of UC will be eligible to receive free school meals (FSM) – in a recently announced move that ministers claim will expand entitlement to more than 500,000 additional children.

Last year, 20 councils took part in a pilot programme in which, rather than requiring parents to apply, eligible pupils were automatically enrolled for FSM. Following the success of these trials, there have been growing calls for government to adopt such a model nationwide – with advocates including the Local Government Association and Labour MP Peter Lamb, who has brought a private members bill before parliament.

Another Labour MP, Helen Hayes, recently asked the Department for Education a series of written parliamentary questions about the “potential merits” of automatic FSM enrolment, including a specific query on whether this could take place during the process of applying for benefits.

In response, the DfE’s early education minister Stephen Morgan said that government is already taking steps to make it easier for children to be enrolled – including via a new online “Eligibility Checking System [which] will allow parents to check their own eligibility and helps the local efforts we have seen to ensure children receive this support”.

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He added that this will be accompanied by exploration of potential proactive steps government could take to identify qualifying pupils – and, potentially, enrol them as part of benefit-claim procedures.

“Departmental officials are working with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to explore options on further data sharing that can get more families signed up for their entitlements,” Morgan said. “Departmental officials are also working with the Department for Work and Pensions to explore options on supporting enrolment through the Universal Credit claims process. The department will engage with local authorities to monitor and assess the impact that these changes are having on the uptake of FSM.”

In Wales – and in London – free school meals are already automatically offered to all primary school pupils, while eligibility is also universal for the first five years of primary education in Scotland. The government in Northern Ireland – which currently offers FSM to households that receive UC and have total post-tax income of no more than £15,000 – also recently floated the idea of ubiquitous provision to all primary schoolchildren.

In the rest of England, meanwhile, children are only eligible if their yearly household income is less than £7,400. The expansion of FSM to all children whose parents claim UC will not only increase eligibility for an extra half a million pupils, but “will lift 100,000 children across England completely out of poverty”, the government has claimed.