Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and what proportion of children in households with no recourse to public funds have been provided with free school meals in the period since 1 September 2022.

Free school meals (FSM) eligibility was extended permanently to children from all No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) households subject to income thresholds, from the start of the 2022 summer term. These pupils are recorded in school census returns in the same way as the wider FSM cohort and are not identified separately.

From June to July 2022, the Department ran a claims process allowing schools to attract pupil premium funding for pupils who became newly eligible for FSM as a result of the extension to NRPF households. The most recent data on the number of NRPF pupils who were claimed for through this process can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium-allocations-and-conditions-of-grant-2022-to-2023.