How many children live in England? The answer should be simple. It is essential knowledge for many reasons: to plan public services, for safeguarding, and to ensure all children’s right to an education. Yet it can’t properly be answered.
The Office for National Statistics runs a census every ten years and uses this to generate annual population estimates. But there are known uncertainties in census estimates – including for children and partly related to migration data issues – and they worsen with every year that passes between each census.
Many children are registered in schools and in contact with health services. Local authorities hold additional data on children known to other services.
But in the gaps between are the missing: children who may number in the hundreds of thousands.
Some may have been in contact with public services at some point in their lives; some never. Some will be from highly marginalised or vulnerable groups including those who have been trafficked into the country, unaccompanied asylum seekers, those born to parents with insecure immigration status, or those who have gone missing from care.
EPI’s report published today, Children missing from education, compares GP registrations with school records covering pupils aged five to 15. We find around 400,000 children we might expect to see in schools are not attending.
When we account for those who are in registered home education, we find approximately 300,000 children unaccounted for. These children may not be in any kind of education, including formal or home school.
The department for education has recently started publishing data on children missing education, including those waiting on a school place and those in receipt of unsuitable education.
They find close to 120,000 children in this category. But their data only covers children known to local authorities – and local authorities were unable to track the whereabouts of more than 10,000 children who left state education between 2022 and 2023.
Of course, there are also problems with using GP registrations as a measure for the number of children in the country. Some families may move areas or out of the country and not de-register, leading to overcounting.
The number of children ‘missing from education’ increased by 40 per cent since 2017
We look at data going back to 2017, however, and find that the number of children ‘missing from education’ increased by 40 per cent to 2023.
While it is possible that overcounting in GP records worsens over time, this is unlikely to fully account for the increase. For example, the Children’s Commissioner, using data collected from local authorities, found that only a quarter of school system exits were due to moving out of England.
Imperfect estimates are the best we can do when the government does not have a solid grasp on how many children are in the country. Data gaps prevent a full understanding of the scale of this issue – and an understanding of who these children are and what might be driving this ‘missingness’.
For example, we find that adolescent girls are more likely to be missing from school than boys. This gap has grown over time and parallels the growing disparity in mental health outcomes between adolescent girls and boys.
We also find that pupils who leave mainstream education for unknown destinations are more likely to be from already-marginalised groups, who are at risk of poor outcomes: for example, a full three-quarters of Traveller pupils and half of Gypsy / Roma pupils leave education, along with one in five who are eligible for FSM for the majority of their time in school and one in five permanently excluded pupils.
Care-experienced pupils are more likely to leave education early too. This may be related to moves between homes or care settings, higher levels of additional needs including mental health issues, and/or stigmatisation or bullying.
This is not a new problem, yet our research shows that the group of children missing from education may have grown substantially in recent years. In 2022 the previous government scrapped a schools bill which included legislation for a register of children missing from schools.
The current government must now follow through with this plan, as well as to integrate data on children from education, health and other administrative sources.
In addition, schools should be required to record and report reasons for removing pupils from their rolls. This would increase accountability and help shine light on the outcomes of pupils who leave schools and the education system.
We need to better understand and address the drivers of young people going missing from education. Every child has a legal right to be educated, and the first step to ensure that is knowing that children exist, and who they are.
Read the full report, ‘Children missing from education‘ here
