The National Children’s Bureau (NCB) has published research on children missing education, and has called upon the government to collection national-level data on the issue. The research found that most situations of children missing education fall into one or more of four categories: child’s feelings and preferences (e.g. frustration, fear of school); family and home (e.g. family breakdown, domestic violence); school (e.g. lack of support for bullying, special educational needs and disabilities, unofficial exclusion); and wider systems and society (e.g. gaps in support for families who have immigrated or moved, who have poor literacy or for whom English is a second language). The NCB has also called for the legal definition of children missing education (under the Education Act 1996) to be amended so that it includes children on a school roll but who are not going to school regularly.
Factors leading to children missing education
