Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many Free School Meal vouchers have been issued to parents in Dudley North constituency during the covid-19 outbreak; and how many of those vouchers have been redeemed.

Our supplier Edenred reported that over £380 million worth of voucher codes had been redeemed into supermarket eGift cards by schools and families through the scheme, as of 19 August 2020. This funding was in addition to existing free school meal budgets.

The number and proportion of students who qualify for free school meals is published in the ‘Schools, pupils and their characteristics’ publication and its underlying data files. The 2019 publication is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2019. We do not collect data at constituency level.