The claim
“In the last year for which we have figures, only 45 boys and girls eligible for free school meals got into Oxbridge.”
Michael Gove MP, Shadow Schools Secretary,  Andrew Marr show, 14 February 2010

The analysis
It’s no secret that, despite, the universities’ efforts to broaden their reach, Oxford and Cambridge still have a disproportionate number of students from private schools.

But Michael Gove cited a shocking statistic – out of the 6,000 or so new undergraduates entering the ivory towers each year, only 45 came from the very poorest families. To be eligible for free school meals, a pupil’s parents must be receiving a low-income payment such as income support or unemployment benefit.

Labour hit back; schools minister Vernon Coaker accused the Tories of using “misleading” figures about free school meals to “distort and do down the achievements” of state school pupils.

Why? There’s a clue in the phrase free school meals. Data is only collected for students studying for A-levels in a state school, rather than the thousands doing so at FE colleges.

But a Conservative spokesman said Coaker was wrong, and accused him of “trying to manipulate his own department’s statistic”.

So who deserves to go to the back of the queue without pudding? Back to the source of the figures: a parliamentary question answered earlier this month.

This used a schools census estimate of the number of 15-year-olds receiving free school meals, in English state schools, in the 2002-3 academic year. The figures were then matched with other data to show if, and where, the pupils showed up at university by the time they were 19, in 2006-7.

So it shouldn’t matter where the pupils did their A-levels – the data was collected earlier than that, while they were all still at school.

And the figure given out in parliament is that Gove quoted: 20 free school meals pupils at the University of Cambridge, and 25 at the University of Oxford.

As a measure of the poorest, this may be a slight underestimate. The statistics only include pupils who received school meals, rather than those who are eligible for them; research for the School Food Trust suggests almost a quarter of children eligible for free school meals don’t actually take them up.  And the numbers don’t include students from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

But isn’t the kind of distortion Labour suggested; FactCheck finds Gove’s claim largely checks out.