Children’s Commissioner calls for central register of children not in school

A new report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has called on the Department for Education (DfE) to ‘make sure no child falls under the radar’ by introducing a central database of children not in school. Humanists UK welcomes this as a key step in closing one of the legal loopholes exploited by proprietors of illegal faith schools. These proprietors claim that children are being home-educated and attend their establishments for supplementary religious education. The lack of any register means these claims go uninvestigated.

The report, Children Missing Education: The Unrolled Report builds on previous investigations by the office of the Children’s Commissioner into attendance and home education, to provide the first in-depth analysis of the procedures local authorities follow to support children missing education. In Summer 2023, the Children’s Commissioner’s office issued a data request to all local authorities in England and identified that 11,576 children were recorded as listed as missing education between Spring 2021-22 and Spring 2022-23. Of this figure 2,868 were still recorded as missing education. The investigation also found that local authorities lacked consistent access to the information they needed to locate children missing education, did not have the powers to see school rolls or receive information in a timely manner, and had to rely on ‘goodwill and relationships with other services to try to find children when they go missing’.

These figures apply to children taken off school rolls. There are many children who never enter a school setting at all and are therefore never counted as ‘missing education’ because local authorities and the DfE never have a record of them existing at all.

Humanists UK has campaigned for the closure of the legal loopholes used by proprietors of illegal faith schools for over a decade. This includes the introduction of a children not in school register and giving Ofsted powers to investigate suspected settings. There are at least 6,000 children in England missing from mainstream education and who are trapped in unsafe illegal faith ‘schools’, being subject to a narrow, scriptural education in cramped, unsanitary conditions. It is hoped the loopholes exploited by proprietors of illegal schools, including a register of children not in school, will now be closed by the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill. This was announced in the 2024 King’s Speech.

Humanists UK’s Education Campaigns Manager Lewis Young said:

‘We welcome the Children Commissioner’s call for a register of children missing education. This latest report is a comprehensive investigation into the growing issue of children missing education, the limited powers available to local authorities, and the need for them to be given greater powers to tackle it.

‘We’ll be writing to the Children’s Commissioner in light of this report to share our work in this area, and we look forward to working with her office as well as Government ministers and officials to develop the proposals set out in the Children’s Wellbeing Bill.’