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?

@Bizawit

Families with CEV members should absolutely have (had) provisions made for them - including in the case of needing to keep children home temporarily. When prevalence is this high, no amount of “measures” that can realistically be put in place are going to prevent high risk of transmission , and there is no excuse for closing schools which are essentially to the well-being of the remaining majority of children.

Exactly. Short of locking a child in an airtight room, there is no way you can guarantee anything is 'covid-safe' - all they need is one contact with an infected person to get infected. So where does the line get drawn? When does 'protection' turn into harm?

@cantkeepawayforever

Bizawit, this thread isn't about closing schools, but about headlines about 'vanishing' children.

Where on earth did you get the word 'vanishing' from? Do you understand what the article is actually about?

I haven’t RTFT.
Yes that is a conveniently high round number, such that I doubt they really know how many children are missing from the school rolls.

Secondly, can’t say how much is due to Covid or lockdowns because they did not know how many were missing from the rolls before Covid and lockdowns. They still don’t know exactly how many, the article makes it clear that many schools did not know how many were missing from their rolls.

I think that it’s a great idea to have a national ID# for each child, could just use NHS# for example, so you can track who is moving between schools so not “missing”, who is moving abroad so not missing, who is being home schooled, and who sadly, may have died as that 5yr old girl did due to a skiing accident the other day.

DailyCarbunkle,

Ever since I was a HE parent when DS was small, and presumably long before that as well, there has been controversy about whether there should be a formal 'register' of HE children, and to what extend the authorities have a right to investigate whether each child is receiving a 'full time education, appropriate to their interests and aptitudes, whether in school or otherwise', as the law requires.

Many HE parents are scarred by the way that 'the system' has treated their children, and thus worry about and in some cases fear the agenda behind this. They feel that the authorities are looking for routes that be used as a way to force the registration of all children.

I would suspect that the agenda being referred to is therefore that of registering all HE children. It does seem slightly rich that the country can never have known about all its children, and it seems obvious that the 'total' register should be a thing that comes well before any 'HE specific' register, rather than an HE register coming first.

I might be misinterpreting but I think a number of posters @EmpressCixi, @cantkeepawayforever @Covidworries are implying that the data is nothing to worry about and that lockdowns haven't caused any increase in risk to children. Is that the case? Do you believe that closing schools for months had no negative impact on children?

Apologies for the use of 'vanishing', that was imprecise. The article is about 'children missing from school rolls', not about school closures.

OP, have you read the posts in which I have explained why risks to children themselves are, in the vast majority of cases, NOT why some parents are keeping children at home rather than sending them to schools? You seem to have created a number of 'straw men'?

@cantkeepawayforever

Apologies for the use of 'vanishing', that was imprecise. The article is about 'children missing from school rolls', not about school closures.

OP, have you read the posts in which I have explained why risks to children themselves are, in the vast majority of cases, NOT why some parents are keeping children at home rather than sending them to schools? You seem to have created a number of 'straw men'?

Yes I have read you saying that. I think in cases where the child is getting a good education at home that's absolutely fine but if the child is just missing out on education, is that the right choice to make? To put the child at risk to protect another person, when in fact that child could get covid from any number of locations besides school?

Did closures of all services - health, education, support, social services - to families including children during 2 lockdowns at the very peaks of the pandemic have a negative effect on children? Yes

Did the closure of schools specifically and uniquely cause this harm? No.

Are there 100,000 children missing from school rolls? This figure seems very suspicious, and was first quoted in 2003.

Are there many, many thousands of children, in school and outside, not having their needs met? Absolutely.

Dopes having schools open, or even having all of these children attend school, sort out the problem? Absolutely not. Having schools open BUT having a disastrous shortage of all other services such that schools can identify issues hand over fist but be totally unable to do anything about them will not solve the problem at all.

To be clear, I think keeping a child home for two weeks so someone can have an operation isn't ideal but it is understandable. Keeping them home for months and months though? Surely a parent has a responsibility to the child that goes beyond constantly worrying about one risk?

@cantkeepawayforever

Did closures of all services - health, education, support, social services - to families including children during 2 lockdowns at the very peaks of the pandemic have a negative effect on children? Yes

Did the closure of schools specifically and uniquely cause this harm? No.

Are there 100,000 children missing from school rolls? This figure seems very suspicious, and was first quoted in 2003.

Are there many, many thousands of children, in school and outside, not having their needs met? Absolutely.

Dopes having schools open, or even having all of these children attend school, sort out the problem? Absolutely not. Having schools open BUT having a disastrous shortage of all other services such that schools can identify issues hand over fist but be totally unable to do anything about them will not solve the problem at all.

I agree other services are also needed - that's a complete no-brainer. The argument I'm making is that closing schools contributed to the problem and you're agreeing with me. So in effect we're saying the same thing.

is that the right choice to make

Hard to say. If schools had been made safer throughout the pandemic, and support easily available for the inevitable mental health issues for children that come about by them doing something that they know could bring harm back to their families, then perhaps making that choice would have been much easier for parents?

Its not a blanket result.
In reality some children fared worse due to lockdowns and some children fared better.
No one knows how the children who struggled would fared is schools had remained open as the problems may be nothing to do with the actual clossure and more to do with worries over an unknown pandemic.
Schools were open for children known to be vunerable.
Some suicides happened during lockdown but the data actually saw a drop of school age suicides during school clossures across the globe. This will take time to research.

Covid mitigations in schools does not mean we expect total safety. I use a seatbelt in my car, never had an accident buy i wear it because it may help if i do, although, im also aware that doesnt mean i am 100% safe in my car.
Mitigations in school wont mean 100% safe but it would make it safe. Ventilation would be a benefit and what harm would this cause. Surely better than windows having to be open all through winter.
Allowing those who wnat to to have had their younger children vaccinated would have been a benefit to those who wanted to and not harmed the families who didnt want to.

The argument I'm making is that closing schools contributed to the problem

But keeping schools fully open to all children with the full complement of teachers throughout the pandemic (and without any mitigations), which I think is what you are suggesting, is not a risk-free proposition either, given that it would have increased illness and death, particularly in 2020 and early 2021 before vaccine roll-out.

Children become at risk through the illness and death of family members, and are harmed by the illness and death of school and other staff they are close to. These harms would have been greater had schools been fully open throughout?

@cantkeepawayforever

is that the right choice to make

Hard to say. If schools had been made safer throughout the pandemic, and support easily available for the inevitable mental health issues for children that come about by them doing something that they know could bring harm back to their families, then perhaps making that choice would have been much easier for parents?

I'm really frustrated with people talking about schools being 'made safer.' Whether a child gets covid or not is binary - they either get it or they don't get it. You can't get it 15%. So even if the risk is reduced and reduced (however you might do that - many countries have had masks without it making any difference for example) there is still always a risk. There's a risk when a child sees a cousin or goes to ballet or whatever. So there isn't a consistent way to guarantee 'safety.' At some point the risk has to be accepted because the child needs education and denying it isn't ethical or sensible.

@cantkeepawayforever

The argument I'm making is that closing schools contributed to the problem

But keeping schools fully open to all children with the full complement of teachers throughout the pandemic (and without any mitigations), which I think is what you are suggesting, is not a risk-free proposition either, given that it would have increased illness and death, particularly in 2020 and early 2021 before vaccine roll-out.

Children become at risk through the illness and death of family members, and are harmed by the illness and death of school and other staff they are close to. These harms would have been greater had schools been fully open throughout?

So, was it the case that the children who did attend school the whole way through were somehow....different? Not at risk?

I do think, however, that had social services and other acute support and therapy services for children been fully open, working face to face and well-funded at all the points that schools were open, and open to SEN / vulnerable (including newly vulnerable) children, as schools were throughout the pandemic, harms would have been reduced

Can you really not understand that 30 children in a class is more of a risk than 5 in a class? Numbers going in were lower when l9ckdowns were happening

Well, it is a balance of harms, isn't it? Many of the vulnerable / SEN children who attended school throughout were at less risk than they would have been had they been at home the full time.

Because numbers were low, they were at lower risk of taking Covid home than if the schools had been open normally.

However, I am aware of a case where that did happen, and the outcome wasn't great. As I say, balance of risks.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

I might be misinterpreting but I think a number of posters *@EmpressCixi, @cantkeepawayforever* *@Covidworries* are implying that the data is nothing to worry about and that lockdowns haven't caused any increase in risk to children. Is that the case? Do you believe that closing schools for months had no negative impact on children?

The data is a big fat unknown. They currently do not know how many children are missing from the school rolls. They estimate is could be “up to 100,000” which is any number between 1 and 100,000 if you want to get factual. In addition they did not know how many children were missing from the school rolls preCovid. That is also a big fat ?

Therefore it is also unknown whether Covid had any impact, positive or negative or statistically insignificant, on children missing from the school rolls.

All the other impacts of Covid on children’s education are valid (increased risk, negative impact to education, etc) but these are separate from the exact # of children missing from school rolls.

There have always been children missing from school rolls for various reasons...moving between counties, countries or internationally, death, illness, abuse, child marriage, etc. We simply do not have the data to say whether Covid affected the number of children missing from school rolls or not.

You have to understand, lockdowns where the school is closed doesn’t change the school roll. Also keeping your child home during Covid for months isn’t actually removing them from the school rolls or necessarily going to cause them to be dropped from school roll either. You have to formally pull your child from school or fail to apply for a place if a year where you need to apply instead of it rolling over (ie secondary, sixth form, etc).

'Safer' = probability of catching Covid, for the purposes i am talking about.

If a family remains pretty much in isolation, with very few contacts, probability of catching Covid is small.

If a family sends a child into school currently, where they may have 30-150 close contacts (primary vs secondary) and many more less close contacts every day (and statistically at least 1 of those contacts will be infected with Covid), and where there are no effective mitigations, the probability of catching covid is higher.

If there were more effective mitigations in schools - close contacts of cases isolating, better ventilation etc - although the number of contacts might be similar, the number of infected people in the school AND the risk of passing the virus on would be smaller, so the risk of being infected is smaller.

(You may say that a family isolating is only delaying the inevitable. However, delaying is obviously useful in terms of improvement in treatment, increasing number of people with immunity in the community preventing massive spikes, rollout of vaccine to all age groups etc.

When this virus really does reach endemicity (as opposed to when the Government declares that it is 'endemic') yes, there will be local outbreaks every now and again - but there should never again be a point where 1 in 10 to 1 in 30 of people are infected throughout the country for quite long periods of time, and where the NHS is under such tremendous pressure.

It's like chicken pox of norovirus - yes, a child might catch one or the other, BUT there will tend to be a short-lived flurry of cases in an area and then none at all for many months, so the probability of catching it on any given day is very small. At the moment, in schools, this is not the case for coronavirus.)

I'd love a follow up on the number of kids in different categories. I homeschool, we previously were on roll so we're on elective HE radar and have had contact, but they didn't have much funding before the pandemic hit and are furiously trying to keep up with an increased caseload. I also know of a family who dereg'd because their school was frankly terrible, the mum was being used as a spokesperson by other parents who didn't feel able to speak up against a useless head, the school didn't inform LEA as they're legally required to the moment they are told children are dereg'd and all documents for one of the children to be considered for secondary were sent to school, not home, and not passed on, so all deadlines have been missed. EHE have subsequently had her children listed as missing from ed, when they shouldn't have been. I'm sure she's in the minority, but I'd like to see data. Would also be interested to see how many of that number have never been on roll, pre pandemic. Final thing I think is worth considering is the way some LAs can be overbearing and create a lot of stress for home ed families, even those who are doing a brilliant job, because of their us/them approach. Again, it's not all of them, but a lot of home ed families appreciate being under the radar because it allows them to focus on their kids instead of being held to nitpicking or unattainable standards by the LA. Like a lot of things, there's loads to the picture. I'm not against contact, our personal experience was pretty positive (though I stressed about it and it was repeatedly cancelled) but I see it from different perspectives. I also used to work in safeguarding and I see the reason for the fear. I also think it's worth children being visible so fears about children's safety can be allayed, and genuine cases for concern be brought into the light. There just isn't the money. It's not there for education full stop, at home or otherwise.

@cantkeepawayforever that makes sense. I find it frustrating when posters imply that some risk is the same as continually high/inevitable risk.

So Dame Rachel wants yo hunt down the missing children and tackle off rolling. Yet she was accused of that very thing in her old role. Don't trust her
schoolsweek.co.uk/childrens-commissioner-candidate-grilled-over-exclusions-at-her-academy-trust/

This one too.
www.theguardian.com/education/2014/oct/18/emails-academies-ofsted-inspectors-rachel-de-souza