The BBC is reporting that thousand of children who left schools during the pandemic have failed to return to school rolls.
The BBC said:
An inquiry is being launched into children who are not attending school in the wake of national lockdowns, the children’s commissioner for England has said.
Dame Rachel de Souza said between 80,000 and 100,000 children were not on any school rolls at all.
“Literally, I am going to go out and find them,” she told BBC News.
The Department for Education (DfE) said its “top priority” was supporting children to attend school and college.
Dame Rachel told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme about 95% of children were usually in school at this time of year – but now, this figure was about 87%.
Some absences were down to illness and Covid, she said, but other children had simply failed to return following classroom closures during the pandemic.
For the school system to lose at least 80,000 children is probably in post-war terms unheard of. Where are these kids? Some are no doubt being properly home schooled by parents who like those in the USA have seen the left wing bias in the classroom via Zoom and other online teaching. But where are the rest? Are they working in the black economy or on the streets? At the moment we do not know. I fear for these missing children as although the British school system is pretty awful for some children, because they have crap families, school is often the only stable place they have in their lives. If school is taken away from these children then I fear greatly for what might become of them.
It shouldn’t be too difficult – start with parents still receiving child allowance.
Have a child? – tick! School register? – tick or not!
What’s not needed is another bureaucratic (taxpayers’ expense) to join these dots, but it seems that’s what were getting.
That might identify those children who are in alternative education but there’s likely to be families who are not claiming child allowance either because they want to be under the radar or they don’t need it and these kids are going to be more difficult to find. Something that might be happening is that those who are 15 to 18 might be working in the black economy or have abandoned school altogether in order to be part of some criminal gang and have little or no contact with parents?
I completely agree that another sclerotic state sector organisation to look into this is not what we need and probably would not be effective anyway. I’d like to see some data on the age profile of these missing children to see whether it’s really a case of young children going missing or teenagers deciding that they’d had enough of school during the school closure.
I must admit that when I look at this story it does seem to be a case of the lockdown bill starting to be totted up. These kids would have been less likely to go missing had the schools not been closed.
This is just the start of that lockdown bill. There’s far worse to come, I fear…
Much much worse I’m afraid.
what we’re getting
As a recently retired administrator in the north west I can confidently predict that a fair proportion will have “gone home” but not to a local estate… Pakistan is a more common destination for such.
You might be correct that this might account for some. Others frm that community might have disappeared into dodgy Madrassas.