Children missing education
Published 19 May 2025
Applies to England
漏 Crown copyright 2025
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Background
In May 2023, the Department for Education (DfE) published the first statistics, collected from local authorities, on estimated numbers of and .聽The first academic year of data provided was 2022/23.
However, the quality and reliability of this data relies on local authorities collecting this information, a process which has not been mandatory previously. For this reason, we decided to explore whether we could get more realistic estimates of children missing education by comparing the ONS population census from March 2021 with the DfE school census from the 2021 spring term (January to February 2021).
The census data was acquired through the Integrated Data Service (IDS), provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
We compared the numbers of mandatory school age children (those aged 5 to 15 at the start of the academic year) in the ONS population census from March 2021 with the DfE school census for the 2020/21 academic year.
Caveats
There are some notable caveats with this data. Firstly, for the DfE school census, the home local authority is only collected for pupils of maintained schools. Therefore, for independent schools, we had to use the local authority of the school that pupils attended as a proxy. There could be some crossover for independent schools if pupils living in one local authority attend school across the border in a neighbouring local authority.
Secondly, the data collection time points are slightly different because the ONS population census was collected in March 2021 and the DfE school census for spring 2021 is collected in January to February 2021. Moreover, although filling out the ONS population census is mandatory, there are still variations in response rates across local authorities.
We cannot compare the resulting CME estimates directly with those collected by the DfE from each local authority (LA), as these LA collections first started being collected in the 2022/23 academic year.
Findings
Unfortunately, as shown in , some data quality issues prevent us from using this data for its intended purpose. In some local authorities, the number of pupils on roll from the DfE school census is higher than in the ONS population census. Even after taking elective home-educated children into account, the discrepancies should not be as high as they are. We can see, from the DfE-published CME and EHE estimates, the approximate number of EHE children in each local authority. These estimates are from a later time period, but we would not expect them to fluctuate wildly enough year to year to account for these size differences. The discrepancy could be due to several factors, such as certain local authorities having more children who are not reported in the ONS population census for various reasons.
Next steps
More accurate estimates of CME/ EHE children might become available in future if the becomes law. The Bill proposes that local authorities should be required to keep an up-to-date register of children who are of compulsory school age and are not educated at full-time schools. The Bill also proposes that local authorities should provide support to home-educating families if they request it. It would be considered an offense for a person who is served with a School Attendance Order to fail to comply with that order (if the local authority considers the home education to be insufficient).