School meal uptake: 2023-24

Like the discontinued Healthy Living Survey, the meal data used to produce these statistics mainly come from school and local authority systems that track meal provision. However, the data differs in timeframe and level of detail. The Healthy Living Survey was a single-day snapshot of school meals and so could be prone to random fluctuations from year to year, particularly at school-level. By contrast, the new methodology takes the meal data for a full financial year from each local authority at sector level. This inevitably leads to some differences between the estimates generated by each methodology particularly in smaller groupings such as special schools within local authorities.

Despite these differences, the charts below show that both methodologies generated estimates with very similar year to year changes for both free school meals and total (free and paid for) meals, although the current method consistently returns slightly lower uptake rates overall compared to the Healthy Living Survey. A table of differences in the methodologies is provided in Figure 7.

Figure 5 Uptake of free school meals, all sectors, 2021-22 to 2023-24: Current method vs Healthy Living Survey

Figure 6 Uptake of school meals (free and paid for), all sectors, 2017-18 to 2023-24: Current method vs Healthy Living Survey [note 1]

Note 1: Estimates have not been calculated for 2020-21 due to the effects of COVID-19 on school meals and attendance.

Figure 7 Differences between Healthy Living Survey and new LFR-based methodologies for school meal uptake estimates