Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate his Department has made of the number of young people who have been identified as having special educational needs or disability were (a) eligible for free school meals and (b) included in the Children in Need census in each of the last 10 years.

This information is in the public domain. We publish the number and proportion of pupils with special educational needs, including those who are also eligible for and claiming free school meals in England in the annual ‘Special educational needs in England’ statistical release which can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-special-educational-needs-sen.

We publish results from the Children in Need census in the annual ‘Characteristics of children in need’ statistical release which can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-children-in-need#characteristics-of-children-in-need.

The number and proportion of children in need who have special educational needs are included in the Outcomes Tables, which were first published in 2012. We will publish the latest figures for 2017 on 28 March 2018.