Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many children in Hartlepool were eligible for free school meals before the introduction of universal credit.

The Department does not differentiate between pupils eligible for free school meals under the pre-Universal Credit free school meals system and those that have become eligible since Universal Credit has been introduced. The number of pupils eligible for and claiming free school meals is published in the file “Underlying data: SFR28/2017” in the annual ‘Schools, pupils and their characteristics’ statistical release.

For 2017, the information is available at:

www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2017.

Information for earlier years is available at:

www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-school-and-pupil-numbers.