Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, when her Department last made an estimate of the proportion of pupils who are eligible but not registered for means-tested free school meals.

The new government has a central mission to break down barriers to opportunity for every child.

The government has inherited a trend of rising child poverty and widening attainment gaps between children eligible for free school meals (FSM) and their peers. Child poverty has increased by 700,000 since 2010, with over four million children now growing up in a low-income family. The government is committed to delivering an ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty by tackling the root causes and giving every child the best start at life. To support this, a new Ministerial taskforce has been set up to develop a Child Poverty Strategy, which will be published in spring 2025. The taskforce will consider a range of policies in assessing what will have the greatest impact in driving down rates of child poverty.

The department does not make a formal assessment of the proportion of children who are eligible to receive FSM but who are not registered. The last assessment conducted in 2013 suggested that 89% of eligible pupils were registered for FSM. As with all policies, the government keeps the approach to FSM under review.