Where are England’s 7,000 missing schoolchildren?

Pupils at a state school in Glasgow sit mock
exams 

Up to 7,700 secondary school pupils in England
have left mainstream schooling and slipped off the radar,
 according to new research.

Of the 553,000 children who started Year 7 at state
schools in England in 2012, 531,000 were still enrolled in 2017,
when they would be due to sit their GCSEs, according to education
research group FFT Education Datalab.

This means around 22,000 pupils had disappeared
from state school rolls in this time – a rise of 10% from
2016.

The vast majority of the absences can be
accounted for. Just under 7,000 ex-state school pupils show up on
the records of private schools or further education colleges.
Thousands more left the English school system to move elsewhere in
the UK or abroad, and a handful will have died.

However, this still leaves between 6,200 and 7,700 pupils
unaccounted for. These “missing” children “were not recorded as
having taken any GCSEs or equivalent qualifications, or had been
linked to any type of school or college”, says TES.

“This group of pupils who leave the rolls of
mainstream schools and yet do not take GCSEs or count in school
league tables concern us greatly,” said Philip Nye, who co-authored
the study.

Those who had fallen off the radar were “more
likely to have been eligible for free schools
meals… We would question whether the Department for
Education can be satisfied that all of these pupils are receiving a
suitable education,” Nye added.

The report’s authors say that one potential explanation for some
of the children who have vanished from records is “off-rolling”,
when schools and parents agree to withdraw a child from school
without a formal exclusion process.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the
Association of School and College Leaders, said the figures were
“extremely worrying”.

“We need to know more about the reasons why
these young people have apparently not completed their schooling or
taken exams,” he said.

Acknowledging
that a “small number of schools” had been found to be using
off-rolling to offload problem pupils, he said that the majority of
absences were likely to be the result of “factors at work which
extend beyond the school gates”.