Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what safeguards are in place to prevent children either never going to school or going missing from school.

The law provides a number of safeguards to ensure that all children receive a suitable full-time education. These are set out in Chapters I and II of Part VI of the Education Act 1996, and include:

• a duty on local authorities to make arrangements to establish, as far as it is possible to do so, the identities of children of compulsory school age in their area who are not receiving suitable education (Section 436A);

• a duty on local authorities to arrange suitable education for all children of compulsory school age who may not for any period receive it, unless such arrangements are made for them (Section 19);

• a duty on parents to ensure that their child of compulsory school age is receiving suitable full-time education, either at school or otherwise (Section 7);

• provision for a local authority to issue a School Attendance Order to a parent where it is not satisfied that a child of compulsory age is receiving a suitable education (Section 437); and

• provision for the prosecution of a parent who has failed to secure their child's regular attendance at school (Section 444).

Statutory guidance requires local authorities to have robust procedures and policies in place to enable them to carry out their duty to identify children of compulsory school age in their area who are not receiving suitable education (Children Missing Education, 2015).

Under the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006, schools have a duty to inform their local authority, at agreed intervals, of the details of pupils who are regularly absent from school or have missed 10 school days or more without permission. Schools must also notify the authority if a pupil is to be deleted from the admission register in certain circumstances.

We are taking steps to ensure the system is as robust as it can be when it comes to protecting young people, while at the same time safeguarding the rights of parents to determine how and where to educate their children. The Department for Education is currently consulting on proposals to strengthen further the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006 in order to require schools to inform local authorities under all grounds when a child’s name is deleted from a school register.