Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what proportion of children excluded from full time education had previously been in receipt of free school meals in each year for which information is available.

The National Statistics release ‘Permanent and fixed-period exclusions in England 2016 to 2017’ includes numbers and rates of exclusions. The full release is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/permanent-and-fixed-period-exclusions-in-england-2016-to-2017.

The number of pupils eligible for free school meals that were excluded and the total number of exclusions in state-funded primary, state-funded secondary and special schools can be found in Table 9 (Free school meal eligibility as at January 2017).

Information for earlier years can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-exclusions.