How many children live in England? The answer should be simple. This is essential knowledge for many reasons: to plan public services, to safeguard and guarantee the right of all children to education. However, it cannot be answered correctly.

The Office for National Statistics conducts a census every ten years and uses it to generate annual population estimates. But there are known uncertainties in census estimates – particularly for children and partly linked to problems with migration data – and they are getting worse with each year that passes between each census.

Many children are enrolled in schools and in contact with health services. Local authorities hold additional data on children known to other services.

But between the two there are missing people: children who can number in the hundreds of thousands.

Some may have come into contact with public services at some point in their lives; some never. Some will belong to very marginalized or vulnerable groups, including those who have been trafficked into the country, unaccompanied asylum seekers, those born to parents with precarious immigration status or those who have disappeared following arrest. charge.

The EPI report released today, Children missing from educationcompares GP registrations with school records of pupils aged five to 15. We are seeing that around 400,000 children who we would expect to see in school are not in school.

When we take into account those in registered home schooling, we find around 300,000 children missing. These children cannot attend any type of education, including formal schooling or home schooling.

The Department of Education recently began publishing data on children who are out of school, including those waiting for a school place and those receiving an unsuitable education.

There are nearly 120,000 children in this category. But their data only covers children known to local authorities – and local authorities were unable to locate more than 10,000 children having left public education between 2022 and 2023.

Of course, there are also problems with using GP registrations as a measure of the number of children in the country. Some families may move or leave the country without deregistering, leading to overcoverage.

The number of children “missing from education” has increased by 40% since 2017

However, we look at data going back to 2017 and find that the number of children ‘missing from education’ has increased by 40% through 2023.

Although it is possible that overcoverage in GP records will worsen over time, it is unlikely that this fully explains this increase. For example, the children’s commissionerusing data collected from local authorities, found that only a quarter of school dropouts were due to moving outside England.

Imperfect estimates are the best thing we can do when the government doesn’t have a clear idea of ​​how many children live in the country. The lack of data prevents us from fully understanding the scale of this problem – and from understanding who these children are and what might be causing this “disappearance”.

For example, we find that adolescent girls are more likely to be absent from school than boys. This gap has widened over time and corresponds to that growing disparity in mental health outcomes between adolescent girls and boys.

We also find that students who leave mainstream education for unknown destinations are more likely to belong to already marginalized groups, who are at risk of poor performance: for example, a three full quarters of Traveler students and half of Gypsy/Roma students leave school, as well as one in five students eligible for FSM for the majority of their school time and one in five students permanently excluded.

Students who have previously received care are also more likely to drop out of school earlier. This may be linked to moves between homes or care settings, higher levels of additional needs including mental health problems, and/or stigma or harassment.

It is this is not a new problemyet our research shows that the group of children missing from education may have increased significantly in recent years. In 2022, the previous government scrapped a schools bill that included a register of children missing from schools.

The current government must now follow through on this plan, as well as integrate data on children from education, health and other administrative sources.

Additionally, schools should be required to record and report the reasons why students are removed from their rolls. This would strengthen accountability and help shine a light on the outcomes of students who leave school and the education system.

We need to better understand and address the factors that lead young people to not access education. Every child has the legal right to be educated, and the first step to achieving this is knowing that children exist and who they are.

Read the full report, ‘Children missing from education‘ here