100,000 vulnerable children missing

[KangSaeByeok]

This is why schools should never be wholesale closed again

www.theguardian.com/society/2021/dec/12/hunt-launched-to-find-ghost-children-missing-from-schools-in-england

I wonder how Halfon’s plan of an army of retired teachers and Ofsted inspectors coming in to teach unpaid will pan out?

I don’t know a single retired teacher who wants to risk going into a classroom to do supply or even hear 1:1 readers at the moment, let alone teach whole classes unpaid!! They are far too worried about unnecessary exposure to covid in schools and the risk it would have on their health.

I'd hazard a guess that NO retired teachers will volunteer to go into the covid swamp at the moment. And why would they, when they could do the same and earn a fortune as supply. And OFSTED staff will currently be as welcome as horse poo for dinner💩.
Think some people in government live in a world of clouds and fairies.

[quote mumsneedwine]@Appuskidu OFSTED has suspended visits until end of term. We assume the inspectors don't want to be ill over Xmas. [/quote]
Indeed! They’ll be back in January though, no doubt!

@Appuskidu yup. With a vengeance. Oh the joy.
Back to the thread title. Many students left schools to move back to their parents home countries - Brexit and a pandemic will do that. Vulnerable students, like this poor little lad, will have been passed on to social services by the school if they didn't respond to remote teaching or come in. Teachers can't do much more after that - we have no powers to intervene. I wish we did. And I'd hate to be a social worker as so many cases to manage, all of which are sad and scary.

It’s disingenuous to claim that schools closing wasn’t a factor in child abuse cases going up.

Same as GPs refusing face to face appointments and lack of F2F HV appointments. It’s not one thing but a culmination of services lacking.

Schools were not all open during lockdown at all. My dc go to two different special schools; one was open all the way through bar the first two weeks, the other was closed for three months. No hub for dc to attend as their needs could not be met there.

I believe Arthur’s teachers were phoning his father regularly and he said things were fine but he didn’t send him back after lockdown when the school reopened by which time it was too late.

@Coldenough schools had to provide provision for key workers and vulnerable and PP students by law. Might have been at a hub school though.
I don't disagree that closing schools will have led to missing child abuse. School staff did not make the decision to close schools, government did. We have so many students off with Covid or other illnesses at the moment it's hard to keep track of each one. Especially as our attendance officer is currently off with covid. But we are trying as best we can. With limited staff, remote and on line teaching and an over arching weariness of here we go again.

Slightly misleading to suggest that those children are all "missing". The article suggests that this number includes all children absent from school, including those who are known to be absent for a reason.

The biggest reasons are inability to meet the needs of pupils with ASN and those with ongoing mental health concerns. These are not issues that can be overcome simply by having schools open. Teachers are not social workers, mental health professionals, and most of them have limited training in helping children with ASN.

I don't doubt that there are some children who have been negatively impacted by the closure of schools to most pupils, but other existing reasons for absence have been evident for many, many years.

How many of these children are actually "missing" and what is being done to locate them? That is not an issue for teachers to solve, or even schools to a certain degree.

Underfunding and not supporting vital public services has caused this, not school closures.

Things like this make it far more likely that schools will be a total shambles after Christmas.

It would be nice if people stopped using Arthur’s memory to virtue signal or further their own cause. He wasn’t exactly short of people reporting his circumstances to children’s services. Attaching that 100,000 figure to his story is pretty awful scaremongering.

If the government were at all interested they wouldn’t have been slashing school budgets and children’s services budgets for years.

If they actually wanted to do something, then reversing cuts to children’s services, properly funding SEN provision and putting proper mitigations in place so that a) schools weren’t a dangerous place for vulnerable children or children with vulnerable household members to be or b) we are left with no option but to close schools would be a start.

Schools absolutely should be the last things that close but you do have to do things to prevent that rather than just cross your fingers and hope things don’t get so bad you have no other choice.

If the response to Arthur's terrible death is simply 'schools must never close again' (as in the OP) then that is abandoning many, many more children to child abuse. It is such an offensively trite response, and I do hope that it is out of ignorance rather simply using a child death as a political pawn.

There were a multitude of failings that led to Arthur's death, exacerbated by huge budget cuts to services that could have intervened more effectively.

The article itself states "Persistent absence increased to 16.3% in secondary schools in autumn 2020, compared with 15% in 2019". So if there are 100,000 'ghost children' now, schools being open in 2019 as normal wasn't solving the problem.

The article also says that they don't know why those 100,000 children are not in school and that this needs investigating. I would suggest that they should have already investigated this? Why have they not got reasons for every single one of those children?

A child not returning after school opening last year was exactly the reason this child and his siblings are now safely in foster care. Without that flag thinks would likely be much worse. So sad this wasn't the case for Arthur but there is a lot to unpick as it certainly should have been

Nail on the head @noblegiraffe why has no-one investigated where these kids are? If 99% are fine that's a whole load of kids not.

Why don't more people care about them?

"Schools were always open to vulnerable children"

Some vulnerable children were refused places unless a social worker pushed for it and vulnerable children attending was not compulsory.

@KangSaeByeok

Nail on the head *@noblegiraffe* why has no-one investigated where these kids are? If 99% are fine that's a whole load of kids not.

Why don't more people care about them?

The unpalatable fact is that very few people cared about these children pre-covid, and will not care about them once education has stabilised for their own children. Is it skeptical to question whether they truly care for them now?

There are also thousands of children without school places because no school will offer them a place due to their needs. My friends primary aged disabled daughter was out of school for nearly a year following exclusion and for 4 months had no contact from the LA and no out of school provision made for her and only got it after threatening legal action. This type of thing has been going on for years.

Problem is assuming that pupil premium means vulnerable. Of course there will be an overlap, but lots of kids will be vulnerable regardless of income level

Not sure anyone thinks PP means vulnerable! Not a lot of correlation in my school. We have tried to follow up every student who has not returned this year, but we have 1 attendance officer (currently has Covid). We are doing our best

@JanglyBeads

Arthur’s school was OPEN for his year group when he died, so that point doesn’t really stand.

Abusive parents opting to keep children at hone is a separate issue.

That article needs a whole lot more explanation. Many parents have kept children off because they are clinically vulnerable and there were few, now no, protections in schools.

Yes MH problems are a huge issue but I’ll be amazed if Zahawi puts adequate support in place.

It's not a different issue. A child being kept at home would've been more concerning had schools been open.

That implies, kirin that no one was concerned about Arthur, when in reality there were several concerns raised, with social services and the police.

@noblegiraffe

That implies, kirin that no one was concerned about Arthur, when in reality there were several concerns raised, with social services and the police.

Whilst that's true @noblegiraffe the reality is that whilst he was in school he wouldn't be being tortured.

@kittensinthekitchen you're absolutely right which is why more people need to say 'But what about' everytime a policy negatively impacts these kids. They deserve to be top of the list of priorities and I won't apologise for saying that.

[quote mumsneedwine]@Coldenough schools had to provide provision for key workers and vulnerable and PP students by law. Might have been at a hub school though.
I don't disagree that closing schools will have led to missing child abuse. School staff did not make the decision to close schools, government did. We have so many students off with Covid or other illnesses at the moment it's hard to keep track of each one. Especially as our attendance officer is currently off with covid. But we are trying as best we can. With limited staff, remote and on line teaching and an over arching weariness of here we go again. [/quote]
My child has an EHCP at a special school.,his school closed throughout both national school closure ,s every child in the school has an EHCP and every child due to the nature of their disabilities are considered vulnerable ,I was sick if hearing children with EHCP,s could go to schools during the lockdowns .

the reality is that whilst he was in school he wouldn't be being tortured.

There is an assumption there that he would have been sent to school. He certainly wasn't sent in when school re-opened.

The number of 'ghost children' out there suggests that there are lots of children not being sent to school, and who historically have not been sent to school, so keeping schools open will not do anything to help them.

Keeping schools open will not solve child abuse. They're geared up for spotting it, but spotting it in this case wasn't the issue. It was spotted and reported.

Schools should also not be used as 'respite from abuse'. They are not open in the holidays, and particularly the summer holidays are very long. They are not open in the evenings and weekends. If you are concerned that a child is in an abusive household then 'at least when they're at school they're not being abused' is an unacceptable response. The abuse needs to be dealt with, or the child removed from the household.

@noblegiraffe I honestly don't know how to respond to the utter lack of empathy in your posts.

Lack of empathy?

I am severely biting my tongue actually to stop saying what I really think of someone using Arthur's death to bitch about school closures.