Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what (a) proportion and (b) number of children eligible for free school meals who achieved five A to C grades at GCSE including English and mathematics in each of the last three years attended a (i) maintained and (ii) grammar school.

The Department’s main measures of secondary school performance are now Progress 8, Attainment 8, Ebacc achievement and entry and pupils achieving a Good Pass in mathematics and English. Progress 8 will be used to identify schools beneath the floor. The latest statistics are available in the ‘GCSE and equivalent results: 2015 to 2016 (provisional) in England’ National Statistics release[1], although breakdowns by pupil characteristics including free school meals is not available until 19 January 2017.

The table below provides the information for the last three years:

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/gcse-and-equivalent-results-2015-to-2016-provisional

[2] In 2013/14, two major reforms were implemented which affect the calculation of key stage 4 performance measures data: 1) Professor Alison Wolf’s Review of Vocational Education recommendations which: restrict the qualifications counted; prevent any qualification from counting as larger than one GCSE; and cap the number of non-GCSEs included in performance measures at two per pupil, and 2) an early entry policy to only count a pupil’s first attempt at a qualification, in subjects counted in the English Baccalaureate. Consequently, the numbers supplied prior to 2013/14 are not comparable with those from 2013/14 onwards.

[3] In 2014/15, early entry policy, under which only a pupil’s first attempt at a qualification is counted in performance measures, was extended to all subjects.