Who are England's 'missing from education' children? What we know about young people not enrolled in school

• Around 11,600 children were missing from England’s schools at some point during the 2022/23 academic year, a new report has found.
• Some children appear to be more at risk, including children from deprived neighbourhoods and those known to social workers.
• Children with special educational needs were also hugely overrepresented in the data.
• The Children’s Commissioner says for many young people with SEN, their needs are currently not being met.

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.

It proved difficult to get a true handle on how many children were truly missing, due to local authorities having different definitions. But the report estimated that some 2,900 children were missing from education as of the end of the 2022/23 school year - with over 8,700 more considered to missing at some point during the year.

But who exactly are these missing children, and what do we know about them? Here’s what the report says:

Painting a picture

The report gathered information from local authorities responsible for education across the country on the children they considered to be most at risk of disappearing from the schooling system. Unfortunately, children in many uniquely vulnerable living situations were flagged.

These included children known to social care, homeless children, and young carers; people under the age of 18 helping care for a family member with a disability, illness, mental health condition, or even a drug or alcohol problem. Children who had just arrived in the UK from overseas were at risk as well, as were child refugees - especially unaccompanied asylum seekers. Children living in refuge placements after domestic abuse were also vulnerable to missing out on schooling.

The most common age for a child to disappear from schooling was around 10 or 11, the age most young people transition from primary to secondary school. Local authorities suggested that families missing out on the secondary school placement they wanted - or that worked best for them - might be a factor.

Children in families that moved around a lot also appeared to be more at risk of going missing from the school system. Roma and Traveller children were disproportionately more likely to become a child missing education than other white British children, while black children from an African background and Asian children from an Indian background were also overrepresented in the data.

Generally, the more deprived a child’s socioeconomic background was, the more likely they were to become a child missing from education. Children who disappeared from state education were “overwhelmingly” from the lowest deciles of the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index, the report’s data showed. It found that those from the poorest neighbourhoods were 1.5 times as likely as others to disappear from school.

Young people known to social care were also much more likely than other children to disappear from the school system. Children missing from education were 2.7 times more likely to be a ‘child in need’ - a term used to refer to children with a social worker, such as those with protection plans in place or with disabilities.

Specifically, 7.1% of all children who were missing from education were recorded as a child in need as of March 2022, despite the group only making up 2.6% of all state-funded school pupils. On top of that, 1.4% of the still-missing children were recorded as being in the care of their local council. These ‘looked after’ pupils only make up 0.6% of state school children.

A previous report by the Commissioner’s office also found that children missing from education were more likely than other children to have histories of poor attendance. They were also more likely to have attended a school which was rated ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted - before its overall grades for schools were dropped earlier this month.

Children with SEN ‘not having their needs met’

Another group of children massively overrepresented in the data was those with special educational needs (SEN). Of the 2,900 children still missing from education at the end of the 2023 school year, a whopping 22% of them had some kind of SEN. SEN children only make up 16% of England’s state school population overall.

But even within that group, children with specific types of SEN were more likely to have stopped attending school than others. Children with social, emotional and mental health difficulties and those with moderate learning difficulties were both disproportionately missing from education at the end of the last school year, compared to children with speech or communication needs, or even children with Autism spectrum disorders.

“What we’ve got is a group of children whose needs are not being met, and it needs sorting out,” De Souza told BBC Radio 5 Live. Recent surveys her team had carried of around one in eight of England’s school-aged children found that children with SEN who felt their needs were being met in school said they were happier, on average, that their peers.

“We need more specialist provision in families... and in schools. Kids want to go to their local school,” she continued. “But that is going to cost, and it is the number one thing, I think, that needs sorting out - alongside attendance - to make sure our kids can go to school.”

The government has published some information for families who need help getting their child to attend school, and on the kind of support available. You can check this out online here.