Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to her Department’s statutory guidance entitled Children missing education - Statutory guidance for local authorities, updated August 2024, when she plans to update the guidance; and if she will make it her policy to regularly update the guidance to adapt to emerging trends and needs as indicated by new data collected.

The department conducted a call for evidence from 18 May to 20 July 2023 on ‘Improving support for children missing education’ to understand the sector’s current approach to identifying and supporting children missing education (CME), and to inform any changes which will help us to improve this support.

To address current challenges in identifying and supporting CME, the department has already:

• Established an aggregate termly local authority data collection on CME to improve our understanding of the CME cohort nationally and locally.
• Held workshops and information sessions for local authorities to improve the consistency of recording of CME data.
• Held best practice webinars on CME for schools and local authorities.

Following the call for evidence, the department is reviewing its CME guidance with a view to publishing an updated version in due course.