to be annoyed that OFSTED find it necessary to details how many pupils are on free school meals.

[dingdongmerrilyonpie]

I mean, why do they do that?

I believe that schools are entitled to extra funding if a certain % are on free schools meals (it's used as a rough measure of poverty of the parents of children at the school)

don't get you?

oh I never knew that - but why does OFSTED have to make that information public, surely that's just a matter between the school and the funding department. Why put it in the Ofsted report?

It's to do with comparing schools across the counties. It means you can compare schools like-for-like. When schools are rated on how well they do in terms of results, you can compare schools with a similar socio-economic catchment.

Hope this helps x

It's an indicator of the wealth of the school's environment. So you can take that into account when you're looking at its results, for example.

So a school with average results but which have a very high proportion of pupils on free school meals may doing extremely well.

it is to help them work out the Value Added data for schools because various "signs of depravation" are taken into account to help compare like with like, rather than just comparing the leafy middle-class school with the city centre school surrounded by tower blocks (I teach in one of the latter and love it, so not being judgemental). Then again, the cut off factor for a high level of FSMs is about 35% iirc and we are on nearer 80%!