“Shocking” lack of urgency to trace children missing from education, Children’s Commissioner warns

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel De Souza, has warned that more than 11,500 children in England went missing from education over the course of one year, having “fallen off the radar” of their local authorities.

New analysis published earlier this month (10 September) revealed that these children went missing between spring 2022 and spring 2023, and many have particular vulnerabilities.

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, 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, the report revealed.

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

The report found that there were “significant inconsistencies” in the use of the term “children missing education” between local authorities, leading to children falling through the gaps.

The Commissioner observed: “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 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 noted.

The report also found that after a period of missing education, the most common destination of children was outside England.

Over a third (36%) of children previously missing education had left England, while 24% remained a child missing education, 24% entered registered education, and 6% home education.

In response to the findings, the Children’s Commissioner has outlined 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.

The Commissioner also called 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.

Dame Rachel de Souza 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’."

She added: “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.”