Hundreds of children missing from education in Buckinghamshire

The figure from May is contained in Buckinghamshire Council’s annual safeguarding report for 2023 to 2024 and is a rise on the 190 children missing from education last year.

Children are ‘missing from education’ if they are not on a school roll, not in school and are not being electively home educated.

The figures were presented during a meeting of the council’s children’s and education select committee last week.

Michael Jarrett, the authority’s service director for education, told the meeting numbers regularly fluctuated but the number of children unaccounted for remains low.

He said: “I was concerned that we were talking about thousands rather than the low numbers of hundreds in relation to children missing from education. Regardless of that, those are numbers that we want to continue to drive down.

“It is in our best interest for children to be in education for obvious reasons and from a safeguarding point of view, when they are in school, we are able to keep a close watching eye.”

Mr Jarrett said an increasing number of children were being home educated in Buckinghamshire and the county had better attendance rates than the national average.

Councillor Lesley Clarke told the meeting a report she worked on showed 16,000 children were missing from education in the county.

But Mr Jarrett said there were only 227 in Bucks, while there were 4,310 in the South East and 33,000 in England.