Around 2.17 million pupils were eligible for free school meals in England in the 2024/25 academic year, compared with 2.09 million pupils in the previous year. Free school meals became a key issue during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, when they were replaced by a voucher scheme in the lockdown and Easter holidays. Although the voucher system was initially not supposed to extend to the summer holidays, a pressure campaign by English footballer, Marcus Rashford resulted in a government U-turn, on the issue, resulting in the voucher scheme covering the summer.

Estimates of Free School Meal eligibility - Explore Education Statistics data set Free School Meal eligibility estimates from Estimate of additional children claiming Free School Meals following expansion of eligibility

In 2024/25, **** percent of school students in the North East of England were eligible for free school meals, the highest share of any region in England. By comparison, the South East of England had the lowest share of pupils eligible for free school meals, at **** percent.

Numbers of eligible pupils and the take up of FSM for Maintained and Academy York Local Authority Schools (Excludes dual registered subsidiary pupils).

All data is taken from the January School Census.

Please note that, due to data protection requirements, we can't publish real values for FSMTotal or FSMTaken when those figures are < 5. Thus, those values have been converted to 9999.

If a cell has no value it means that data is not collected for that field for that specific school.

Progression to HE by Free School Meal eligibility(including progression rate gap)

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. It provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to children each school day. Information in this dataset consists of participation and lunches served.

Progression to HE by Free School Meal eligibility, Sex and Ethnic Group - Regional level

Replication materials for Ruffini, Krista. "Universal Access to Free School Meals and Student Achievement: Evidence from the Community Eligibility Provision." Journal of Human Resources. A previously published version of this project contained 0 byte files. Please reference the latest version of the project to access the most current data.

Data presented here is an extract of data taken from the Annual School Meal Census in publicly funded schools in Scotland. The data shows the provision of school meals (including free school meals) for each school in the Glasgow local authority area. The dataset forms part of a time series and is available for the years 2003 through to 2014. Full datasets can be downloaded from The Scottish Government. The data is graduated to school level and data includes: the numbers on the school roll; counts of pupils entitled to free school meals; counts of pupils present on the day of the survey, counts of pupils taking a school meal (free or not) on the day of the survey; and counts of pupils taking a free school meal on the day of the survey. In order to protect the identity of pupils a * used in the dataset denotes the number of pupils is 4 or less (zero included) or where such a figure could be worked out. A * * used in the dataset denotes where the difference between the number of pupils on the register and pupils with FME is 4 or less. Some of the datasets also include information on breakfast clubs, the provision of fresh fruit and water and the anonymity of the free school meal application process. The School Meal Census is carried out annually. For individual dataset errata or qualifications users should consult the background data or notes of the individual datasets. Licence: None fsm2003-2014.zip - https://dataservices.open.glasgow.gov.uk/Download/Organisation/728522f0-86da-48c6-8f75-1649934eb8a4/Dataset/7a0f701f-b55f-463f-a748-d62d6adf9979/File/51a57ba3-cf7b-4738-90ff-81d48dac9820/Version/7e43a6c6-cff0-4be2-b6e4-cd2e9c2707a5

• - Explore Education Statistics data set Free School Meals, Gender and Ethnic Group - Region from Widening participation in higher education

Number of pupils eligible for Free School Meals in Calderdale Primary Schools (Academies and Local Authority Maintained Schools); the data source is the termly school census. Academy data is only available from October 2015 onwards. The dataset for Academies and Local Authority Maintained Schools is being published as one dataset from October 2016. May 2020 is missing because this census was cancelled by the government due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Other schools data

Number of pupils in state-funded nursery, primary, secondary, special schools and pupil referral units by free school meal eligibility, from Spring 2015/16 to Autumn 2020/21

Regression and Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition outputs for understanding the free school meals earning gap, based on Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) data for people who were aged 30 years between April 2016 and April 2019.

This is the number of pupils eligible for and claiming free school meals (FSM) as a percentage of all pupils. This includes state-funded nurseries, state-funded primary schools, state-funded secondary schools, Pupil referral units (PRUs), state-funded special schools and non-maintained special schools. General hospital schools are excluded. This includes full time and part time pupils who are sole or dual main registrations, boarding pupils, and pupils registered with other providers and further education colleges. The information is based on data collected via the pupil level spring school census, school level annual school census, general hospital schools census and alternative provision census.

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