Schools had a choice whether to use the national voucher scheme or to make local arrangements.13 The Department emphasised that all the options it had considered would have run alongside any arrangements that schools had made for themselves. It explained that, during the summer term, typically around 10% of schools continued to use their own catering supplier, and around 12% of schools used arrangements with a different catering supplier, to provide food parcels to eligible children at home. Some of these schools may have also used the voucher scheme at times.14