Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many children are eligible for free school meals.

The number and proportion of pupils eligible for and claiming free school meals in England is published at the annual ‘Schools, pupils and their characteristics’ statistical release, available to view here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2017.

Data for each school is available in the Underlying data: SFR28/2017 of the annual ‘Schools, pupils and their characteristics’ statistical release, contained in file ‘SFR28_2017_Schools_Pupils_UD’. The figures can be filtered by school phase (column N), school type (column O), number of pupils taking a free school meal on census day (column EB) and Free School Meal eligibility (column ED).