Children Missing Education

Nick Gibb Excerpts

Thursday 18th May 2023 Written Statements

[The Minister for Schools (Nick Gibb)]

The Government are committed to ensuring that all children, especially the most vulnerable in our society, are safe and have access to an excellent education.

The Department for Education has today launched a call for evidence on “Improving Support for Children Missing Education” in England, which is open until 20 July 2023. This builds on other policies to improve the lives of children, including the children’s social care implementation strategy and consultation “Stable Homes, Built on Love”, and plans to reform special educational needs provision via the “Special Educational Needs and Disabilities and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan”.

Children missing education (CME) are children of compulsory school age who are not registered pupils at a school and are not receiving suitable education otherwise than at school. CME are at significant risk of under- achieving and becoming NEET—not in education, employment or training—later in life. More immediately, they are also at significant risk of becoming victims of harm, exploitation or radicalisation.

CME make up a very small minority of school-aged children and some will be missing education for a short period—for example, while they move between schools during the academic year. Children who miss longer periods of education present greater concerns, and it is especially important that these children can be effectively identified and supported.

The legislative framework places responsibilities for CME on parents, schools and local authorities. In 2016 the Department issued statutory “Children Missing Education” guidance that sets key principles to enable local authorities in England to carry out their legal duty to make arrangements for identifying, as far as it is possible to do so, CME. This guidance is available on gov.uk.

The “Improving Support for Children Missing Education” call for evidence seeks to strengthen the understanding of CME and the challenges that those responsible for addressing CME face. This call for evidence seeks comments, evidence and insight regarding:

How local authorities, schools and other agencies identify and support CME;

The challenges that the sector faces in identifying and supporting CME, and how these could be addressed; and

How best practice in identifying and supporting CME can be promoted.

Since autumn 2022, the Department has also been gathering aggregate, termly data on CME from local authorities in England on a voluntary basis. This data is helping the Government to improve our understanding of the CME cohort and the support that local authorities may need. Headline figures from the autumn 2022 and spring 2023 collection will be published today on gov.uk. These are experimental statistics and the quality of the data returns should improve over time.

[HCWS781]