Data and methodology

Sources and timing

From 2025 onwards, school meal uptake has been estimated using a methodology that combines data on number of meals provided from the Local Government (LG) finance workbook LFR01, pupil roll and free school meal registrations data from the pupil census and pupil attendance data from the annual attendance and absence collection.

The LFR01 workbook is part of the Scottish Local Government Finance Accredited Official Statistics and shows information on education spend from final, audited expenditure and income figures for all local authorities in Scotland. The information includes the number of school meals taken across the financial year in each LA, split by free and paid, and by school sector. The LFR01 data is used to monitor local authority expenditure for policy purposes and in Grant Aided Expenditure assessments.

The new method estimates the average number of meals taken per pupil per school day based on the number of meals provided from the LFR01 workbook, the number of pupils from the pupil census and the number of school days in a year. The number of school days available is adjusted for attendance rates as published here School attendance and absence statistics - gov.scot. No adjustment is made to account for schools that operate on a four-and-a-half-day week due to the variation in provision for meals in these schools.

Accredited Official Statistics on attendance and absence were previously collected and published biennially but moved to an annual cycle from the 2022/23 academic year. For the years where no attendance statistics are available, an estimate is made by taking the geometric mean of the attendance rates from the years before and after.

Attendance data by free school meal status first became available for the 2020/21 academic year, which is not covered in this publication due to the effects of COVID-19 on school meals and attendance, therefore free school meal uptake statistics using the current methodology have been produced from the 2021-22 financial year onwards.

The LFR01 workbook covers a financial year (from April to the following March). The pupil census is conducted in September each year. The data used for the meal uptake estimates is aligned such that the LFR data is combined with the data from the pupil census that took place in the same financial year e.g. 2023-24 LFR01 with the September 2023 pupil census.

Data quality

The underlying data for the meal uptake rate calculations are sourced from Accredited Official Statistics which comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics.

The school meal uptake statistics for 2023-24 include a comparison to meal uptake statistics from the Healthy Living Survey. This comparison shows that, despite differences in the reference period (single day snapshot compared to average over one year), both methodologies generated estimates with very similar year to year changes for both free school meals and total (free and paid for) meals.

Supplementary statistics

A number of supplementary statistics providing additional breakdowns of these statistics by local authorities are released in conjunction with this bulletin.