The Back to School Clothing and Footwear Allowance (BSCFA) scheme provides a one-off payment to eligible families to assist with the extra costs when their children start school each autumn. The allowance is intended as a contribution towards meeting the full cost of school clothing and footwear.
Budget 2006 provided for a number of improvements to the scheme. These include –
an increase of €40 in BSCFA rates from June 2006
Extension of entitlement to the back to school clothing and footwear allowance to recipients of guardian's (formerly orphan's) payments for the first time, and
An increase in the additional income disregard for entitlement to the scheme from €50 to €100 over the relevant social welfare rate.
From June 2006, an allowance of €120 is payable in respect of qualified children aged from 2 to 11 years, or €190 in respect of qualified children aged from 12 to 22 years. The Department of Education and Science operates a grant scheme towards the cost of providing school textbooks for pupils from low-income families at primary and post-primary level. In addition, schools participating in the School Support programme (SSP) under Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) the new action plan for educational inclusion, and which operate a book loan/rental scheme for 2006/2007, have been allocated increased grant aid from a supplementary fund which has been made available for this purpose. Schools are notified of the scheme each year by circular letter.
In 2006, some 172,000 children will benefit from the back to school clothing and footwear allowance scheme at an annual cost of €25.6 million. On the basis of the number of recipients of the allowance in 2006, the cost of creating a new allowance at a rate of €300 for primary school children and €475 for children over 12 years of age as suggested by the Deputy would be €64 million per annum. This would be an additional €38.4 million over the current annual expenditure on the scheme. Further improvements to the scheme are being considered in the context of the Budget, and in the light of resources available to me for improvements in social welfare payments generally, and ongoing progress on developing a second-tier style support targeted child poverty.