The children’s commissioner has urged the government to “fulfil its commitment” to create a compulsory child-not-in-school register following the collapse of its planned Schools Bill legislation.
In a new report on looked-after children, Dame Rachel de Souza also calls on the Department for Education to meet the commitment it made in the Schools White Paper to consult on giving councils the power to direct academy trusts to take on pupils.
The recommendations come in a new report calling for steps to be taken to ensure that children in care are attending schools rated “good” or “outstanding” every day.
It says: “The [Office of the Children’s Commissioner] believes that the government should fulfil its commitment to legislate for a compulsory child-not-in-school register. While the government has not progressed with the Schools Bill, momentum for setting up a children-not-in-school register should not be lost.”
Such a register was part of the planned Schools Bill legislation, which was dropped last year.
Call for action to help children in care
Dame Rachel has made a wide-ranging series of recommendations to improve admissions, education and safeguarding to enhance outcomes for children in care
The children’s commissioner’s analysis of 50,846 school-age children who had been in care for at least four weeks as of March 2022 reveals that 1,363 - 2.7 per cent - were missing from school.
The report says that while local authority figures are not complete and are not directly comparable, they show that an average 0.3 per cent of pupils in general were missing education.
Dame Rachel has said the government should enhance the role of virtual school headteachers (VSH) for children with a social worker so that they have the power to direct admissions for this group of children.
The report says that while VSH have the power to direct maintained schools to admit a looked-after child, this power does not currently extend to academies and multi-academy trusts. This means that in practice, a local authority can ask an academy to admit a looked-after child but has no power to direct it to do so.
The report recommends that local authorities should be given powers to direct academy trusts to admit looked-after children, and calls on the government to “fulfil the commitment set out in the Schools White Paper last year to consult on a new backstop power for local authorities to direct trusts to admit children”.
The analysis reveals that unaccompanied children seeking asylum, male children, older children, children with special educational needs, and children without stable care placements were disproportionately more likely to not be in school.
It shows that 541 young people were not enrolled with any school or education provider at all; 673 were in unregistered settings, such as private tuition, home education or a patchwork of other provision that is not inspected; and 149 were enrolled in a school “but missing without authorisation 100 per cent of the time”.
And only 11 per cent of children looked after for at least 12 months as of 31 March 2022 achieved grade 5 GCSEs in English and maths in 202-/22, much lower than the 50 per cent in the overall student population. The latest government data from 2022 shows that 38 per cent of 19- to 21-year-old care leavers were not in education, employment or training, compared with 11 per cent of all other young people in the same age group
Dame Rachel said that “school forms a central part of the safety net supporting these children and can provide them with a sense of stability and trusted relationships they need but may not freely have”.
She added: “That is why, using my statutory data collection powers, I have asked every local authority for information about all the children in their care of compulsory school age, and what school they attend. A lack of proper, robust information on these children should no longer be the reason they are not receiving a suitable education.”
Heads back call for not-in-school register
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has said it agrees with the children’s commissioner about the importance of all children in care attending school on a regular basis, and echoes the call for a mandatory register of children who are not in school.
Julie McCulloch, the union’s director of policy, said: “This is something that is long overdue and, now that the Schools Bill has been scrapped, work must be done to ensure that this measure actually passes into law.
“Schools and local authorities are doing all they can to support the children in their care, but are under huge financial pressure. A decade of government austerity has resulted in cuts to council support services, while school budgets have been stretched to breaking point. If schools are to provide the pastoral and specialist support that many children in care will require in order to regularly attend school, then appropriate funding has to be put in place.”
James Bowen, assistant general secretary at the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “While the vast majority of children in care do attend school regularly, we should be very concerned about the small percentage that are currently not attending any school at all; particularly as we know that schools can provide a vital layer of protection for some of our most vulnerable children.
“Reasons for pupils in care missing school are usually complex and varied, and include issues such as mental ill-health, as well as a feeling of difference to their peers. This can be exacerbated by the distance between school and a care placement.
“The support these young people require is intensive and complex. Schools play a vital role in supporting children in care, but they certainly can’t do this alone - where children are absent from school it is essential that other services step in and support, too. Central to the response to this issue should be a properly funded and well-resourced social care service that has the capacity to give these young people the level of support and care they need.”
