Vicky Foxcroft – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Vicky Foxcroft on 2015-10-20.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many children aged between four and seven in (a) Lewisham, Deptford constituency, (b) the London Borough of Lewisham and (c) London received free school meals in each of the last five academic years.

Mr Sam Gyimah

Prior to the 2014/15 academic year, the department did not collect data on the number of free school meals given out to pupils below school level. The department does not, therefore, hold information on receipt of free school meals by pupils of different ages for earlier years.

Data from the January 2015 school census at regional and local authority level can be found in table 8e of ‘Schools, Pupils and their Characteristics: January 2015 statistics’[1]. Constituency level data can be obtained by aggregating the underlying school level data from the same publication. This is available in the ‘SFR16_2015_Schools_Pupils_UD’ file within the underlying data, which contains information on each school within constituencies and the number of infant pupils who took a free school meal on census day.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2015

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