Free school meals beats Ofsted grade as a targeting signal

Most target lists we see are sorted by Ofsted grade. For a lot of products that's the wrong axis entirely, and free school meal eligibility is the better one, because it's the closest public proxy for a budget that actually exists.

Across 21,754 open England schools with a figure recorded, the mean eligibility is 26.9 per cent and the median is 23. The ninetieth percentile is 52.6, and 2,625 schools are above 50 per cent.

The reason to care is pupil premium. It's allocated per eligible pupil, it's ring-fenced in practice if not always in theory, and heads are accountable for showing what it bought. A school at 52 per cent eligibility has several times the discretionary spend of a school at 8 per cent, for the same pupil count, on exactly the things that follow disadvantage: tutoring, attendance work, pastoral support, breakfast provision, SEND resource.

An Ofsted grade tells you none of that. It tells you what an inspector concluded, on a date, under a framework that may since have changed.

So if your product is bought with pupil premium, sort by eligibility, filter to the 2,625 schools above half, and accept that you'll be selling into the hardest-pressed schools in the country and should price accordingly.

The trap, and it's a real one: don't read a rise in FSM eligibility as a rise in poverty. Eligibility rules shifted during the universal credit rollout and transitional protections kept families on the register who would previously have dropped off, so the national figure has drifted upward for administrative reasons as well as economic ones. Compare schools with each other in the same year. Don't build a trend line.

Method. Counted from the free school meal percentage GIAS carries per school, open England schools only, excluding the roughly 2,800 with no figure recorded. This is eligibility, not take-up, and the two differ most in secondaries.