Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make it his policy to introduce free school meals for children who have parents or carers seeking asylum in the UK.

Under this government, eligibility for free school meals has been extended several times and to more groups of children than any other government over the past half a century.

Under the benefits-based criteria, 1.7 million of the most disadvantaged pupils are eligible for and claim a free school meal. This includes children of families in receipt of support under Section VI of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999.

In addition to this, free school meal eligibility was extended to children from all families subject to no recourse to public funds on April 19, 2022, building on the temporary extension to some groups that had been in place since 2020. Throughout this entire period, children from a subset of failed asylum seekers supported under Section 4 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 have and continue to be eligible for free school meals.