Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 13 October 2020 to Question 100944 on Free School Meals, whether his Department has made a more recent assessment of the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals who are registered to receive this support.

As noted in the previous response, we do not routinely collect information on the proportion of pupils that would be entitled to a free school meal (FSM) but do not make a claim.

There are now 1.7 million pupils eligible and claiming FSM. This information is published annually in the Statistical First Release: Schools, pupils and their characteristics. The latest available data was published in June 2021, based on the January 2021 census. It can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2021.

Under this government, eligibility for FSM has been extended several times and to more groups of children than any other government over the past half a century.

We want to make sure as many eligible pupils as possible are claiming FSM, and to make it as simple as possible for schools and local authorities to determine eligibility. We have taken a number of steps to support this, as set out in the previous response.