Children: Missed Education

Baroness Massey of Darwen Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how they plan to respond to the National Children’s Bureau report, Children Missing Education, published on 31 January; and what plans they have to improve the collection of national-level data on such children.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Agnew of Oulton) (Con)]

My Lords, in September 2016 we introduced a duty on schools and local authorities to work jointly when carrying out inquiries to establish the whereabouts of children to ensure that they are safe and receiving suitable education. We have a commitment to review the impact of these regulations by September 2019. The review will take into account the points raised in the National Children’s Bureau report issued in January this year.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that response. He will be aware that almost 50,000 children were missing from education between 2017 and 2018. How will the Government build an accurate picture of who these children are, where they live and what their needs are? How will they form a strategy to deal with this problem when there is no national data on these children?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, we believe that part of the reason for the awareness of more children being home educated is as a result of the duties we placed on schools in the 2016 guidance, which I mentioned in my first Answer. The next stage is to ensure that local authorities are using all their existing powers to investigate cases of where home education might be occurring or where children are missing. Yesterday, in our integration strategy, we announced further measures on that.