Missing children - a silent crisis

I was listening to a podcast this week (https://rootsforchurches.podbean.com/e/the-silent-crisis-school-refusal-and-mental-health-in-the-uk/) where Kate Dommett from Transforming Lives for Good (https://www.tlg.org.uk/) quoted the figure of 400,000 children missing from education. It is an excellent podcast, by the way, but that figure jumped out at me.

I work in this field and spend large amounts of my time thinking about children who "go down the gaps" of our education system, but that figure suddenly hit home - four hundred thousand! I looked the reference up and it comes from an Education Policy Institute report from late last year (Dec 2024) https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/children-missing-from-education/. It is worth quoting from the original report.....

• By comparing GP registrations with school registrations and data on pupils in registered home education for the first time, EPI finds that up to 300,000 children may be missing entirely from education in 2023, a 40 per cent increase from 2017.[1]

• Up to 400,000 children are estimated to be not in school, a 50 per cent increase. According to available data the number of formally registered home-educated children has increased by over 100 per cent from 2017 to almost 95,000 children in 2023.

  
  

That is a number of children equivalent to the whole population of Leicester, or two and a half times the entire population of Preston (where I live). Now, home education has a strong and honourable tradition in the UK and a comparatively small fraction of the 400000 will fall into that category (somewhere between 10 and 20%). But that leaves a lot of children who are highly unlikely to be being educated and whose life chances are being seriously impacted.

Schools are not perfect. I was talking with a highly successful CEO of a large company today who was let down by the school system. We know that this happens and we must always get better at meeting individual needs. But education matters and. at their best, schools play critical roles in the development of young people and open doors and windows to the future.

400,000! Why isn't this a national emergency? Why aren't we talking about this?

Start by ensuring that we know how every child in the country is being educated. If someone is born in our country, or becomes resident here, they have a right to the highest possible standard of education. Controversially, even if a parent/carer removes them from the school system to be home educated or placed in the private sector the local state school should know about them - a school at the heart of its community should hold the information about the education of every child in that geographical area.. The fragmentation of our current education system means that it is far too easy for children to "slip down the cracks" - community schooling should mean just that.

Perhaps that is a step too far. But the current situation in which we accept that hundreds of thousands of children are not receiving an education is morally unacceptable. 400,000 - the figure shocks me and we will reap the whirlwind in coming years.

Find the families, find the children and re-engage them with education - it matters! There is work to be done.