Where are England’s 7,000 missing schoolchildren?

Up to 7,700 secondary school pupils in England have left mainstream schooling and slipped off the radar, according to new research.

Of the 553,000 children who started Year 7 at state schools in England in 2012, 531,000 were still enrolled in 2017, when they would be due to sit their GCSEs, according to education research group FFT Education Datalab.

This means around 22,000 pupils had disappeared from state school rolls in this time - a rise of 10% from 2016.

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The vast majority of the absences can be accounted for. Just under 7,000 ex-state school pupils show up on the records of private schools or further education colleges. Thousands more left the English school system to move elsewhere in the UK or abroad, and a handful will have died.

However, this still leaves between 6,200 and 7,700 pupils unaccounted for. These “missing” children “were not recorded as having taken any GCSEs or equivalent qualifications, or had been linked to any type of school or college”, says TES.

“This group of pupils who leave the rolls of mainstream schools and yet do not take GCSEs or count in school league tables concern us greatly,” said Philip Nye, who co-authored the study.

Those who had fallen off the radar were “more likely to have been eligible for free schools meals... We would question whether the Department for Education can be satisfied that all of these pupils are receiving a suitable education,” Nye added.

The report’s authors say that one potential explanation for some of the children who have vanished from records is “off-rolling”, when schools and parents agree to withdraw a child from school without a formal exclusion process.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the figures were “extremely worrying”.

“We need to know more about the reasons why these young people have apparently not completed their schooling or taken exams,” he said.

Acknowledging that a “small number of schools” had been found to be using off-rolling to offload problem pupils, he said that the majority of absences were likely to be the result of “factors at work which extend beyond the school gates”.