Better data needed on children missing from school
A report from the children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza has highlighted the "urgent concern" regarding the lack of accurate real time data of children missing from education.
The research aimed to establish the extent to which LAs are able to meet their legal duty to make arrangements to establish the identities of children in their area who are not registered pupils at a school and are not receiving suitable education
The research aimed to understand the data each authority holds about the numbers of children in education settings or who are not engaged in formal education.
The research found that most councils don’t know how many pupils are missing out on education in their areas.
The report said: "From these key findings, we do not have an accurate real time figure of how many children there are in England, nor where they are – let alone the number of children not receiving education. This is an urgent concern. Estimates of children missing from education require timely, real-time data on the number of children in each LA, how many are enrolled in formal education and the number of EHE children."
Policy recommendations include reviewing how schools collect data and how it is used, and possibly using attendance codes, and school-level attendance policy enactment (e.g: closing registration early).
For LA level data collection, the report is urging for a review to improve attendance data collection. This includes implementing a unique identifier for children and standardising the protocols for sharing data between MATs and LAs.
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