Querying Stock Levels

Querying Stock Levels

I want to be able to populate a variable with the current stock level.

I was expecting to be able to use 
      
      stocklevel=item.get("actual_available_for_sale_stock")

If I pull through the entire record, I can see this field has a value of 1, however when I use the function above it returns NULL

Oddly it appears that only some fields can be queried by this method !

Can someone please advise me with the correct function to use to query this field?

Thank you in advance.