WIREDGOV

More than 11,500 children in England went missing from education over the course of one year – despite having previously attended.

New analysis found these children went missing between spring 2022 and spring 2023 – and many have particular vulnerabilities that makes tracing them even more urgent. It provides, for the first time, a clearer picture of who these children are, their backgrounds and their circumstances.

Compared to their peers in state-funded education, the children whose last-known destination was missing education were 1.4 times as likely to have a special educational need (SEN), 1.5 times as likely to live in the most deprived neighbourhoods and 2.7 times as likely to have a social worker as a child in need.

They were also more likely to be making the transition to secondary school from primary, aged 10 at the start of the school year.

As a new school year begins, the Children’s Commissioner has used her statutory data powers to shine a light on a crisis of increasing seriousness, laying bare the need for a unique identifier for every child to stop them falling through the gaps in services – as well as a rehaul of the support available to children in order to get them back into the classroom.

Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza yesterday said:

“I am increasingly worried about the thousands of children being denied their right to an education, having fallen off the radar of their local authorities within the space of a year.

“Many of them are facing particular challenges in their lives: living in deprived neighbourhoods, needing support for a special educational need, or already known to social care. It reflects a troubling gap in our society to protect and support some of the most vulnerable.

“But this isn’t simply about the numbers. The numbers alone are a scandal but added to that is the fact that in far too many instances, no one knows where these children are, if they’re safe, or even offer a consistent definition of what they mean locally by ‘missing’.

“There is a shocking lack of urgency in trying to trace these children. Local authorities, despite their best efforts, are hampered by poor resources, insufficient access to the right data and inadequate powers to rectify this.

“Children have told me how much they want to be in school, and we need to be as ambitious for them as they are for themselves. We need to do much more, much earlier, to proactively prevent these children from going missing – and to help reengage those who already are.”

The Commissioner’s work found that there were many inconsistences in how local authorities address the problem of children missing education in their area. There is no shared national definition – 40% of authorities had different interpretations – and only 33 out of 129 authorities provided information about proactive steps they take to prevent children becoming missing.

In two authorities, children had to be missing for two months before investigations were even opened into their case. In many cases, investigations were dropped and archived if data checks were inconclusive, often as a result of poor access to the right kind of data, such as Border Force or council tax records.

The Children’s Commissioner has used the publication of this new data to reiterate her call for a unique ID for every child, in order to prevent them from falling through the gaps in services and support them back into education.

With publication of yesterday’s report, ‘The Unrolled Story’, the Commissioner also takes the opportunity to call for:

• Local authorities to be given the resources they need to proactively trace and support children missing, or at risk of missing, their education;
• A reliable database for cases of children missing education and improved data-sharing arrangements that aren’t simply based on local agreements or goodwill;
• Improved mental health support in school – where children have told the Commissioner they want to receive it – and in-house educational psychologists to support children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND);
• Support with practical issues like uniform costs or flexibility for children who may have difficult family circumstances or caring responsibilities; and
• Better support over the school holidays for children making the transition between different education stages, through phone calls home or meetings with parents.