Up to 100,000 children missing from school rolls

[TheDailyCarbunkle]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-60054253

If anyone has any doubt about the risk created by lockdowns, doubt no more. Many of those children will be absolutely fine, well cared for, educated at home. But many many of them will not - without regular attendance at school and someone outside their family monitoring them daily, they will have just fallen through the cracks. Who knows what the final fallout of this will be?

@cantkeepawayforever

So actually the headline should be '100,000 children not fully known to local authorities and social services'?

Schools have a vitally important role to play in noticing and flagging up issues to the appropriate authorities, which is why we have to be additionally sensitive if children are not educated in school each day.

However, for this 100,000, it's the LA and SS who need to be following up?

LA EHE teams have a legal duty to report any concerns to social services for home ed kids. The vast majority of these turn out to be overkill, which means in addition to some A+Es automatically reporting kids to social services the minute they find out they are home educated, overzealous neighbours and generally nosey people (I do use that term in jest, it can be a bit frustrating though, I fell out with a neighbour whose kids kept throwing rocks over the fence, they were reported to the landlord - not by me- and a week or so later I had a call from social services about my DC!) the proportion of home ed kids reported to social services is actually higher than children in school, despite being a much smaller part of the population, the number of home ed children actually needing social services though is statistically much lower (something like 0.3% of the home ed population - it's been a couple of years since I looked at the stats though as I've simply not had time)

LA EHE teams are responsible for education. Social services for welfare. The two are often conflated with each department fobbing it off to the other because they simply don't seem to understand their own duties or obligations and social services are overstretched as it is, which is why some kids have been missed.

I too would be interested in the real numbers that are actually ‘missing’.
Children who have been deregistered from school are known about, those that haven’t been deregistered and just haven’t turn up to school are known about.
I suspect my children would be considered among that 100,000 missing as they have never been to school and we have never had any involvement from the LA but are they really ‘missing’ when you consider that they are known to their GP, dentists, optician, health visitor, sports coaches and so on.

@musicalfrog

Maybe it extends to nurseries and health visiting too?

I'm pretty sure lockdowns will have increased child abuse in the home, whatever the age of the child.

I didn't realise the conversation was so prescriptive!

I think I have an issue with the way that the thread (and article) have been framed.

Why is it framed as 'on school rolls'? Like you, I am not sure why it is a headline and thread focused so specifically on school-age children and framed as a 'school-related' issue?

'x number of children invisible to authorities after lockdown and therefore potentially vulnerable' would seem to me to be more accurate, more interesting and more actionable? The number will be smaller and harder to obtain (being all children known to have been born / arrived in the uk minus all known to authorities, made up of registered at schools, pre-schools, as home educated etc) but would be more useful in pinpointing where there might genuinely be an issue.

As in Children’s services? They do not know of every child in their area. That data isn't held.

I think that's where the problem lies, then. Why don't we know of all the children living in an area? Is that why we use 'school rolls' as a proxy for 'list of children', and get worried about those not on roll because it means we don't have them 'on the list'?

'Country does not know where all its children are' is perhaps an eye-catching alternative heading, though would perhaps come with the caveat 'Oh, and actually we never have known this'.....

There are plenty of children who are permanently excluded or pushed out of schools or simply have no school to go to. This isn't new.

@cantkeepawayforever ' country doesn't know where its children are' sounds like a The Day Today headline 😁. So am i right that actually the figure of 100,000 children missing isnt right? That loads of them will be children who are being legitimately home educated?

My children were deregistered from private prep school so were never on the LEA radar. Nobody ever checked-up on them in all the years they were home-schooled. Obviously ours was a conscious decision and they received a good education but I definitely think there should be a register to ensure that vulnerable 'missing' children are identified and supported. My children has specific needs and I think that there are many children with SEN withdrawn from school because they are not coping. These children need more support but unfortunately due to delays in diagnosis etc their needs are not being met.

[quote Ohmygodyesthatsit]@cantkeepawayforever ' country doesn't know where its children are' sounds like a The Day Today headline 😁. So am i right that actually the figure of 100,000 children missing isnt right? That loads of them will be children who are being legitimately home educated?[/quote]
Yes.

Tbh I think thast have been thinking too much about the younger end - the point that Spikeyball makes is very pertinent, and it is the slightly older children who have been consciously 'offrolled', permanently excluded or have no school to attend who should be receiving more focus. They will, however, have been not in school before the pandemic either, so are less 'newsworthy' - though their involvement in e.g. county lines and other forms of child exploitation extremely serious.

If people took covid more seriously and schools were more accessible that number would be much lower.

@cantkeepawayforever thank you for the explanation .

This - exactly right OP

Whatever the reason, children being unaccounted for is a cause for concern. They could be absolutely fine, or they could be in a horrible abusive situation, the problem is that nobody actually knows. There's a very good reason why children attend school every day and someone follows up if they fail to attend.

@cantkeepawayforever

I agree, OP. I also wonder how many would return if schools were made safer through good ventilation and lower Covid cases?

So people are worried about ventilation but don't think to mention this to the schools? This is unexplained absences isn't it?

CloudPop,

It's not just ventilation, though - and they know full well that schools can't sort it out.

Schools are close contact, non-masked, crowded places. Primary pupils are wholly unvaccinated.

Government policy is not to mitigate the Covid risks in schools, so anyone sending children in knows that infection can come back with them. Some families aren't able to commit to take that risk, and so have chosen home education until incidence is lower (locally, been well up into the thousands for school-age children since mid last term).

Schools understand why parents are making those choices, but cannot change the risks. Those families account for the 'off rolled' primary age children i am aware of.

www.heraldscotland.com/politics/19860144.covid-scotland-thousands-pupils-missing-school/

Not sure if this is a good source but 6,900 children in Scotland haven't gone back to school after lockdown

School refusal is quite a common problem that I've seen on the boards and I suspect it's not being supported by the services.

I've seen the 100,000 figure quoted in 2020/21 too. Here's a link from 2021

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-57640390

Why is it framed as 'on school rolls'? Like you, I am not sure why it is a headline and thread focused so specifically on school-age children and framed as a 'school-related' issue?

x number of children invisible to authorities after lockdown and therefore potentially vulnerable' would seem to me to be more accurate, more interesting and more actionable? The number will be smaller and harder to obtain (being all children known to have been born / arrived in the uk minus all known to authorities, made up of registered at schools, pre-schools, as home educated etc) but would be more useful in pinpointing where there might genuinely be an issue

You are right - and it is other services that hold this data...health, immigration services etc not 'schools' .

I am on a Facebook group with 21,000 members.
It is a group for parents of children mostly SEN for whom school is not a safe space but is extremely damaging as the school cannot meet their need. I know this from bitter experience. Many of these families are hounded and threatened with fines for non attendance and daily we see another family deregistering their children and homeschool them instead. They simple have no choice.
I guess other families nay have family members who are ECV and may not respond or have the opportunity for a vaccine so may choose to homeschool their children.
So I guess there always will be families who deregister. Plus of course Ronany families who have always taken kids out of school at a certain age.

Romany

@cantkeepawayforever

CloudPop,

It's not just ventilation, though - and they know full well that schools can't sort it out.

Schools are close contact, non-masked, crowded places. Primary pupils are wholly unvaccinated.

Government policy is not to mitigate the Covid risks in schools, so anyone sending children in knows that infection can come back with them. Some families aren't able to commit to take that risk, and so have chosen home education until incidence is lower (locally, been well up into the thousands for school-age children since mid last term).

Schools understand why parents are making those choices, but cannot change the risks. Those families account for the 'off rolled' primary age children i am aware of.

But surely you'd still tell the school that the children weren't coming in? Not just disappear?

Yes. And very few of these 100,000 HAVE disappeared - they are electively home educated, excluded or applied to schools but have no place. Just not currently on roll.

Probably also includes those in the hospital education service because not currently well enough to attend school, and sen children waiting for a special school place but unable to attend an unsuitable mainstream. All known of, just not formally on role.

If I could have afforded to, I would have stopped working and removed my CEV child from school for as long as it took for the vaccines to kick in for 12-15 year olds - so that would have been all last year and up to this January when he's just had his second vaccine. CV/CEV children have been very much forgotten and I would hazard a guess that a good propotion of those 100k are children that are vulnerable to covid in some way.

I think the point is that, for many children, the school knows where they have gone BUT the organisations which should pick them up or monitoring them from that point - often the LA or SS - isn’t swinging into action, sometimes because that is really difficult, as with school-scarred hone educators wary of the system for good reasons. Those children who do disappear do so because of the cracks between the systems or - for example in the Arthur case where sws visited repeatedly but saw nothing wrong - because systems were either not followed up energetically enough or deliberately obstructed.

@FlibbertyGiblets

Popping on here to say I know of special schools for children with disabilities shut in March 2020 and did not reopen til the next school year. These are also ghost children, their needs ignored, discounted, not considered. Obvs nothing new there, sigh.

Yeah that wasn't unusual ,my son's special school closed in march 2020 and didn't open untill September 2020 It then closed in December 2020 and stayed closed untill march 2021 Nobody was up in arms then But suddenly it's a political issue and everyone cares 🤔

It is only a small amount to do with COVID though, and a massive amount to do with all services being so badly under funded and over stretched

The majority of Children's Centres have gone. All the home visits for new borns.
HVs have hundreds of dc on caseload and are barely able to do much more than keep up with child protection cases in some areas
Schools don't have the staffing to follow up, when the first check doesn't give an answer. So many of the pastoral roles have gone, and the skeleton staff that is left is dealing with stuff CAMHS should be dealing with, but CAMHS can't deal with those dc because mental health support is so sparse.
Education Welfare services cut to the bone
Social services bar is so high, that even when EVERY professional involved knows the child should not be left in the home, there is nowhere else to place them
The children's commissioner in that link talks about involving the police - clearly she has no idea how stretched the police are in so much of the country.
There are too many children who have such awful neglect who then go on to have their own children (statistically at a very young age) and they have had no role model in terms of parenting, and the cycle goes on.

This headline is just that - a headline with little substance behind it in that article.
Anyone who works in any of the publicly funded professions know there are children missing, and they can all list the reasons why. They could also do so long before COVID and long before the most recent high profile child deaths.

Not helped of course by successive Governments not funding enough suitable school places for children with additional needs. But that is another story in its own right.