Schools - Transactions

Free school meals payments

Since the last date our focus has been answering the many enquiries about the free school meals payment.  Some parents changed their bank details and we found that some payments had not been made at all.

So far, we have received in excess of 800 enquiries within the last 6 weeks. We are working hard to answer the remainder of these by the end of the week.  If parents contact you for an update, please ask them to bear with us - we will answer all enquiries received.

When contacting us please make sure to provide full details as often we only receive a child's name and it can take more time to find the answer.  Our system logs enquries by parent name and address, so it important we have these details.

We have received some applications for August 2020 already. Please note it is too early to apply for next session - do not advise parents to apply yet.

There has also been some confusion over who should receive the payments. To confirm, only families who are currently in receipt of a free school meals are entitled to a payment. Parents of children in P1 to P3 must meet the criteria for free milk and clothing grant. Families not in receipt or who do not meet the criteria for free school meals could receive discretionary payments during the closures. If you have been approached by specific parents/carers about hardship or if you know about vulnerable families that could be missing out, please provide details to Laura Hammersley as soon as possible including pupil names, pupil stages and parent/carer name.  

For your information the payment dates and amounts paid are listed below.  After the first payment run, we identified several duplicate payment lines which were subsequently removied from future payment runs.

Fortnightly payment runs:
23/03/20 - £129,037.50 (5735 payments of £22.50)
06/04/20 - £116,077.50 (5159 payments of £22.50 – duplicates from 1st payment run removed)
20/04/20 - £122,917.50 (5463 payments of £22.50)
04/05/20 - £135,517.50 (6023 payments of £22.50)

Ad-hoc payments:
Discretionary payments identified by schools total - £2925.00 (130 payments of £22.50)
Transactions ad-hoc total - £42,480.00

The next payment date will be 18 May.

Education Maintenance Allowances

Payments resumed for young people in receipt of EMA on Friday 1 May.

Under the current circumstances, it is not possible for newly awarded students to sign and complete their learning agreement.  Therefore, we have decided in the interim to make payments to students who were awarded after 1 March, WITHOUT a completed learning agreement. Payments will be backdated to the start of school closures on 23 March. If students qualified for any earlier payments, these will be subject to attendance confirmation in the usual way, subject to SEEMiS access.

Should SEEMiS access be granted soon, we will ask you to confirm attendance for all weeks up to 6 MARCH ONLY.  Please do not confirm any attendance after this date, as payments for these weeks are being made outwith the SEEMiS system and may result in duplicate payments being issued.

Applications for the current session closed on 31 March.

P1/S1 placements for Aug 2020

There have been no changes to allocations since 20 March.

The second and third rounds of allocations should have taken place, however with our focus on FSM payments and without SEEMiS access, these have not taken place.

We aim to respond to all late placing requests received between 25 December and 3 May by 31 May 2020. Late requests received after 3 May will not be considered until the end of June.

SEEMiS

As you will have read above, the Transactions team are still without SEEMiS access.  Please do not email us asking to check things for you, as we are unable to do this.