Thousands of children are going missing from England’s schools, being “denied” the basic human right of an education.
That’s according to a new report released by Children’s Commissioner Rachel de Souza this month. The Commissioner has been investigating just how many of England’s young people are missing from education, meaning that they are of compulsory school age but are are not registered pupils at a school - nor are they receiving any kind of suitable alternative education.
That’s according to a new report released by Children’s Commissioner Rachel de Souza this month. The Commissioner has been investigating just how many of England’s young people are missing from education, meaning that they are of compulsory school age but are are not registered pupils at a school - nor are they receiving any kind of suitable alternative education.
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NewsTranscript
00:00A new report by the Children's Commissioner this month has revealed the extent of a very
00:04serious issue.
00:06Children missing from education.
00:07Hello, my name is Amber Allitt and I'm a journalist specialising in education.
00:12I found that during the 2022 to 2023 academic year, more than 11,000 pupils of compulsory
00:19school age were not enrolled in a school or were receiving a suitable alternative education
00:24at some point during the year.
00:26Some of the groups of children identified by the report as being more at risk of disappearing
00:30from the schooling system are unexpected, like children from England's most economically
00:35deprived neighbourhoods or families that move around a lot.
00:39But some aren't so straightforward.
00:41Here are three other groups of children who are vulnerable to going missing from education.
00:47The first is children with special educational needs.
00:50Of the 2,900 children still missing at the end of the 2023 school year, 22% of them had
00:56some kind of special educational needs, even though this group only make up 16% of the
01:02state's school population overall.
01:04Of this group, young people with social, emotional and mental health difficulties and those with
01:09moderate learning difficulties are both disproportionately affected.
01:14The next is children known to social care.
01:16A child identified as missing from education is 2.7 times more likely to be a child in
01:22need, which is any child with a social worker assigned to them.
01:26This can include children in local authority care or with a family protection order in place.
01:32Finally, children who leave state education and become a child missing education were
01:36more likely than other children in state-funded schools to have attended a school rated requires
01:41improvement or inadequate by Ofsted before these overall ratings were recently dropped.
01:47They were also more likely to have poor school attendance overall or have been previously
01:51excluded from their school.