Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to capture data on the reasons for children not being in school settings.

Ensuring that children are in school is a top priority for the government. As part of the comprehensive national attendance strategy to ensure that every child registered at school attends every day, the department has a daily data scheme to understand the drivers for absence. The local authority level data is published fortnightly and made available to schools and local authorities at a pupil level and is some of the richest and most timely attendance data in the world. Participation in the daily data scheme will become mandatory for all state-funded schools from September 2024. The latest data is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/pupil-attendance-in-schools.

The department also collects information about the reason for placement into alternative provision (AP) by schools and local authorities through the school census and the AP census. This includes placements into non-school alternative provision settings.

For those children who are not enrolled at a school, the department collects termly data on home educated children and children missing education from local authorities, doing so on a voluntary basis since October 2022, with the collection becoming mandatory this autumn. Analysis of the data will help to improve understand of the drivers behind the rise in children not in school. The data for home educated children can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/elective-home-education. The data for children missing education can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/children-missing-education.