Best Practice

Children missing education: It’s time to track the vulnerable

Mental health Pastoral issues Behaviour Safeguarding Government policy
Schools are expected to follow up every absence, and yet there are thousands of children who have nobody checking up on them at all. The issue of children missing education is difficult to tackle, so what can be done to protect the vulnerable? Suzanne O’Connell reports

In a recent report by the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) – Children Missing Education – it is suggested that 49,187 children were reported as missing education at some point in 2016/17. This meant an average of 222 children in each local authority or more than seven classrooms of children. Perhaps most worryingly, this is an estimate only.

There is no national data collection of children missing education (CME). The only way of obtaining information about these children is through a Freedom of Information request to individual local authorities. However, the data returned varies and the best overall figure that can be drawn is only an approximate one.

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