Schools transactions update 6 February 2026
Read to find out about free school meals for children in P6 and P7 and the February holiday payment. There’s also an update on P1/S1 intake for August 2026.
Free school meals
FSM for P6 & P7 pupils
As first notified in the 9 January 2025 blog, the Scottish Government has expanded free school meal entitlement to pupils in P6 and P7 whose parents are in receipt of the Scottish Child Payment (SCP).
We opened applications in February 2025 and this led to an increase of around 350 children being entitled to receive free school meals. Since then, a data sharing agreement with Social Security Scotland was established and in August 2025 they shared with us details of all families of P6/P7 age children who are in receipt of SCP. This has allowed us to automatically award a further 1,100 children.
We had to cross-check the shared data with the SEEMiS pupil records and this took some time to develop and test but this work was finally completed in December. As these children were entitled since August, we decided to backdate the FSM award to the start of term. We appreciate that many families have already paid for their child’s meals, and therefore this would need to be credited back to their ParentPay account.
Parents were notified on Friday 6 February of their backdated award, and this includes details of how to request a refund. They are advised they will need to ask their child’s school to process a refund to their Parent Account – please download the guidance:
Please note that the Transactions team does not have access to the ParentPay system and cannot assist with any queries regarding this. If you have any questions about the refund process, please refer these to Education Operations.
How to view and report on SEEMiS
We have created a new report in Custom Reports to allow you to report on both income-based FSM entitlement, and P6/7 SCP awards. The Free School Meals – Click+Go help sheet has been updated to include guidance on how to view both of these reports. We recommend downloading this to familiarise yourself with the different reports.
Free school meals holiday payment
The February holiday payment is £12.50 and will be paid into parents’ bank accounts on 9 February.
This is paid to parents of all children currently in receipt of an income-based eligibility to FSM – those awarded for P6 and P7 children under the SCP scheme do not receive a payment.
Applications for 2026-2027 session
In past years we’ve seen parents start to apply for their children starting P1 in August. It is too early to apply as applications do not open for the next session until June. If you do provide info to the parents of your registered children, please advise not to apply just yet – many families who qualify will receive an automatic award and will not need to apply.
P1/S1 intake update
The Intake working group met in January to decide on the intake limits for each school, and these have now been shared with head teachers.
Transactions are now responsible for registered any late P1 enrolments, therefore you may have noticed your P1 system access changed to read only on 20 January.
Contacting the Transactions team
Many of you will be aware we established a contact form which should be used for any enquiries. These come into a work tray and can be assigned to a team member to respond as soon as possible.
We still receive correspondence to our school placements, school grants and EMA mailboxes, as well as to members of the team directly. Please note that these mailboxes are closing soon and all correspondence must go through the contact form.
You can find the contact form here:
Next update
We’ll post our next update in March when the decisions on P1 and S1 placing requests are made.