A report from the children’s commissioner for England – Dame Rachel de Souza – finds that these children disappeared from the education system between Spring 2022 and Spring 2023 despite having previously attended school.
Official data is not collected nationally on children missing education (CME) but estimates based on the little information that does exist suggests that as many as 117,000 children could be missing from education at any one time.
Separate government data has shown that around 40% of live CME cases have been open for more than 12 weeks – a whole school term – while 13% have been open for more than a year.
A child who is missing education is defined as someone of compulsory school age but who is not registered at school and not receiving suitable education otherwise, for example at home.
The figure in the new research comes via statutory data requests from the children’s commissioner to local authorities, which led to the identification of 11,576 children who had gone missing from education at some point between Spring 2022 and 2023.
Concerningly, these children were more likely to come from deprived neighbourhoods, have SEN or social, emotional and mental health needs, or be known to social care.
The report states: “Children identified as CME were 1.5 times more likely to live in the most deprived neighbourhoods, 1.4 times as likely to have an identified SEN, and 2.7 times more likely to be a child in need, relative to the cohort of children in state-funded education.”
The report also warns that CME are more likely to be making the transition to secondary school from primary when they drop out.
Of the 11,576 children identified by the research, 2,868 were known or suspected to be CME by their local authority, while 1,063 had moved on to “unknown destinations”.
The children’s comissioner has long argued for the need for a unique identifier for every child to stop them falling through gaps in services.
The report also found “many inconsistences” in how local authorities address the problem of CME in their area, including no shared national definition of CME, with 40% of authorities having different interpretations.
In two authorities, children had to be missing for two months before investigations were even opened and in other cases investigations were dropped if data checks were inconclusive.
As part of the research, only 33 out of 129 authorities provided information about proactive steps they take to prevent children becoming missing.
The report calls for increased resources for local authorities to “proactively trace and support” children as well as a ”reliable database” for cases and improved data-sharing arrangements.
Other strategies that might improve the situation, the report suggests, include:
- Improved mental health support in school and in-house educational psychologists to support SEN children.
- Support with practical issues like uniform costs or flexibility for children who may have difficult family circumstances or caring responsibilities.
- Better support over the school holidays for children making the transition between different education stages, for example phone calls home or meetings with parents.
Dame Rachel 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’s commissioner: Children missing education: The unrolled story, September 2024: www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/resource/children-missing-education-the-unrolled-story