Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the supplementary tables published alongside her Department's consultation, Analysing family circumstances and education, how many of the 2,043,500 children classified as disadvantaged are in families in which at least one parent is in work.

Data provided by Department for Work and Pensions and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs as part of the technical consultation does not allow us to determine whether individuals in the children’s household are in work at any given point in time.

Entitlement for free school meals is determined mainly by eligibility for certain benefits which indicate that households are either workless or with limited hours being worked. 961,800 of the pupils classified as disadvantaged in the technical consultation Analysing family circumstances and education were not recorded as being eligible for free school meals in 2016.