Charlton Manor Primary School has suspended its Twitter account after receiving "horrendous abuse" online following a tweet about free school meals.

A row erupted between the school and opposition leader Cllr Matt Hartley after he criticised the school for tweeting politically.

During a meeting last night (March 21) Labour councillor Christine Grice raised the issue before council, referring to the "distress" caused to members of the school staff and called on the council leader to comment.

Leader of the council Denise Hyland allowed her deputy Cllr Dan Thorpe to answer, who said: "The debate that happened online was about the very sensitive issue of free school meals and the government's appalling decision to restrict access to school meals. It is absolutely right people are debating it online because people are angry about it.

"It's happened since then that school has been subjected to horrendous abuse online from UKIP right-wing extremists and has had to shut down its Twitter account to deal with those issues.

"There are real issues of poverty in that school and we have asked the opposition to visit that school to see the issues and not get involved with that kind of debate."

Although the thread has been removed, screenshots seen by News Shopper show the school retweeting a comment comparing Tory MP's "guzzling champagne in parliament" yet voting to "take away the taxpayer-funded benefits that give all children a free school meal."

It refers to a new Government scheme that compares additional earnings to Universal Credit eligibility to determine whether children can receive free school meals - meaning that there is potential for children to lose their meal once Universal Credit is fully rolled out.

In one in a series of now deleted tweets, the school said: "We support free school meals and the idea of our children receiving a hot meal, for some the only meal they have, it isn't a political point as such but it is a matter of record that Conservative MPs have just voted to take that away which is shameful."

In response to the conversation, tweets were sent to the school saying its behaviour had been "appalling", "disgraceful" and "pathetic", and called for the headteacher to be sacked.

Cllr Hartley told News Shopper afterwards: "Charlton Manor is an excellent school, but staff using the school's official Twitter feed to push a party political agenda is absolutely wrong. This is wrong in any case, but especially alarming when the content being shared is fake news created to deliberately mislead people.

"I raised this with the school and to my surprise, whoever was tweeting doubled down on this breach of impartiality, making further party political attacks.

"If the school says it received abusive tweets from other Twitter users about this, then like all abuse on social media I condemn that unequivocally. However, that has nothing to do with the point I raised, which was about the inappropriateness of using the school's official Twitter feed for party political attacks.

A spokesman for the school said: "The School made a retweet in error and has put procedures in place to ensure that this does not happen again.

"The School wanted to make clear that it supports free school meals for our eligible families and is only concerned with their welfare. The School leads the way on healthy approaches in education around food and nutrition.

"Due to the negative comments of a few, we took the decision to temporarily suspend the School twitter account, although we hope to be back online in the near future.

"The School is happy to work with all political parties, organisations and interested individuals to ensure that our families and pupils get the very best deal available and our door will always be open to those who wish to visit and support our ethos."