00:00A new report by the Children's Commissioner this month has revealed the extent of a very
00:04serious issue.
00:06Children missing from education.
00:07Hello, my name is Amber Allitt and I'm a journalist specialising in education.
00:12I found that during the 2022 to 2023 academic year, more than 11,000 pupils of compulsory
00:19school age were not enrolled in a school or were receiving a suitable alternative education
00:24at some point during the year.
00:26Some of the groups of children identified by the report as being more at risk of disappearing
00:30from the schooling system are unexpected, like children from England's most economically
00:35deprived neighbourhoods or families that move around a lot.
00:39But some aren't so straightforward.
00:41Here are three other groups of children who are vulnerable to going missing from education.
00:47The first is children with special educational needs.
00:50Of the 2,900 children still missing at the end of the 2023 school year, 22% of them had
00:56some kind of special educational needs, even though this group only make up 16% of the
01:02state's school population overall.
01:04Of this group, young people with social, emotional and mental health difficulties and those with
01:09moderate learning difficulties are both disproportionately affected.
01:14The next is children known to social care.
01:16A child identified as missing from education is 2.7 times more likely to be a child in
01:22need, which is any child with a social worker assigned to them.
01:26This can include children in local authority care or with a family protection order in place.
01:32Finally, children who leave state education and become a child missing education were
01:36more likely than other children in state-funded schools to have attended a school rated requires
01:41improvement or inadequate by Ofsted before these overall ratings were recently dropped.
01:47They were also more likely to have poor school attendance overall or have been previously
01:51excluded from their school.
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