Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats)
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937. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection the steps that she is taking to provide the school meals scheme in all DEIS and qualifying schools. [2421/23]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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The School Meals Programme provides funding towards the provision of food services to some 1,600 schools and organisations benefitting 260,000 children.  The objective of the programme is to provide regular, nutritious food to children to support them in taking full advantage of the education provided to them.  The programme is an important component of policies to encourage school attendance and extra educational achievement.

Budget 2022 provided €68.1 million for the programme with an additional €9m provided to allow access to all new DEIS schools from September 2022.  Additional funding for the programme has been provided for 2023 bringing the total to €94.4m.  This represents a 53% funding increase in the period since 2020.  

Funding under the school meals (local projects) scheme can be provided for breakfast, snack, cold lunch, dinner, hot school meals and afterschool clubs and is based on a maximum rate per child per day, depending on the type of meal being provided.  

Entry to the School Meals Scheme has been confined to DEIS schools in addition to schools identified by the Department of Education as having levels of concentrated disadvantage meaning that their students would benefit from access to the School Meals Programme.  Participation in the scheme is entirely voluntary and schools must reapply for funding in advance of each school year. 

In March 2022, the Minister for Education announced an extension of the Delivering Equality of Opportunity in School to an additional 320 schools from September 2022.  In July, I announced that the access to the hot school meal option would be extended to the 282 newly designated DEIS primary schools and to the cold lunch option to the 38 newly designated DEIS secondary schools from September benefitting some 60,000 children.

This means that since my appointment as Minister for Social Protection, I have increased the number of schools with access to the Hot School Meal option from 37 to over 500.

I am committed to continuing to expand the school meals programme and building further on the significant extension of the programme in recent years.  In this regard, I commissioned the evaluation of the school meals programme to review all elements of the programme.

I trust this clarifies the matter.