Free-meal entitlement (FME) is being used as a measure of the socio-economic characteristics of Scottish schools for the purposes of target-setting. This article examines the association between FME and the socio-economic circumstances of schools using a national survey of school-leavers. It also evaluates the extent to which FME provides a surrogate for socio-economic status in predicting attainment. It finds that FME is an inconsistent measure of poverty, and is only a partial proxy for socio-economic circumstances. It concludes that school comparisons using FME may give a spurious impression of validity.
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Linda Croxford (2000) studied this question.