Nearly 1,500 children in care are missing from school, the first collection of such attendance data has found, leaving youngsters “invisible to the services designed to support them”.
The attendance of these children “needs to be at the top of every policymaker’s agenda”, said children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza.
Using her statutory powers to collect information from councils, de Souza found 1,363 of the 50,846 school-age children who had been in care for at least four weeks last year were missing from school (2.7 per cent).
This includes not being enrolled with any school at all (541), in unregistered settings such as home education or private tuition (673) or enrolled at a school but missing without authorisation for 100 per cent of the time (149).
