‘Tens of thousands’ missing from school after lockdown

LOCKDOWN has led to pupils leaving school and not returning, the Children’s Commissioner has said as she admitted “tens of thousands” are missing from education.

Dame Rachel de Souza has today published an audit of local authorities revealing a “striking” lack of accurate and up-to-date data on the numbers of children in each area.

The report argues that this means vulnerable pupils could fall through the cracks and miss out on support.

“While the majority of children are attending every day, there are tens of thousands of children who are persistently or severely absent or missing from education altogether,” Dame Rachel said.

She added that there were “some children who haven’t come back after the lockdowns, and not just because of having to isolate due to Covid”.

Dame Rachel said that even before the pandemic there were children who were “falling through the gaps in education” if they were waiting for a school place, were being home-educated or who had simply “fallen off the radar”.

She said she had surveyed all local authorities, which revealed the “striking” finding that local authorities “do not have an accurate figure of how many children there are in England – let alone the number of children not receiving education”.

Out of 145 authorities surveyed, making up 96 per cent of the total, just 39 per cent could provide an estimate on the number of children who missed at least a week of school waiting for a school placement, while fewer than one in five (18 per cent) could estimate the number of children at private schools.

Only eight per cent could give an estimate of the number of children in home education who were not registered with the local authority.

All local authorities that responded did provide an estimate of the number of children who were home-educated but these estimates ranged from 0 per cent to 2.4 per cent.

In total, 92 per cent were able to provide an estimate of the number missing from education but these estimates ranged from 0 per cent to 4.1 per cent

Around half of all local authorities could provide an estimate of persistent and severe absence last term, with figures suggesting that 22 per cent of pupils were persistently absent while 1.5 per cent were severely absent.

“These estimates suggest 1,782,000 children were persistently absent and 124,000 children were severely absent,” the report said.