The article promotes a discussion on the intersections between recent social policies of supplementary income and basic education. It points to some of the principal tendencies in current social policy identified by the literature, in the context of globalisation and social exclusion, relating them to data on poverty and inequality in Brazil. It discusses the differences between the concepts of poverty, hunger and exclusion, amongst others, attempting to situate the programmes of supplementary income associated directly or indirectly with the school, which were established in the last decade in this country. It summarises and comments data from research on the impact of some of these programmes and proposes questions which should be considered both in the debate on educational policy and on public administration and in future studies.