No Such Thing as Average: Why 300,000 children aren’t in school
By TIm Thorlby
5 mins read
This blog is about how we often design services for people who don’t exist. (And what we might do about it)
Consider this. When Postman Pat pops into his village shop in Greendale, the shopkeeper (Mrs Goggins, of course!) seems to know everyone and everything. She is a mine of information, imparting knowledge in her lilting Scottish tones. What a wonderful world to live in! In reality, however, such knowledge and connections may possibly still be found in the village shop, but increasingly, and for most of us, this is a lost world.
In a country of 70 million people, one of the challenges of doing anything ‘at scale’ is that you have to generalise about your customers (if you are a business) or your service users (if you are a public service). But for our national public services and also many large businesses, this ‘one size fits all’ approach is not working well.
In this blog, we will look at one example of how this issue is playing out in one of our public services – the state school system. In particular, I want to explore why so many children are now missing entirely from our classrooms, and what a creative and enterprising solution – a non-average solution - might look like.
How many children don’t go to school?
Counting how many children are in school is reasonably straightforward. On the other hand, counting how many children are not in school is surprisingly tricky and requires a fair amount of detective work.
To start with, and rather curiously, no-one is even sure how many children there are in the UK. Yeah, you read that right. We have some reasonable estimates of course, but is there is no ‘list’, so to speak, so in all of the numbers that follow, there is a bit of ambiguity.
In December 2024, the Education Policy Institute published a report[1] setting out the first serious attempt to estimate how many children are not in school in England. They drew together statistics from schools, local authorities and GP practices to provide the best estimates currently possible.
They estimated that, in 2023, some 400,000 children in England were not being educated in school. They also found that this figure had grown by over 50% in the five years from 2017 to 2023 – a rapid and substantial increase.
This includes school children of all ages, from 5 to 16, although it becomes more marked amongst children of secondary school age. It includes both girls and boys, although with girls now more likely than boys to be out of school.
The best available evidence for what has driven this recent increase is that it is closely associated with a rise in mental health issues amongst children, accelerating during and after the pandemic, with both school and health services lacking the capacity to respond to these increasing needs, leaving a growing problem.
Home education
It is important to note at this point that some 95,000 of these 400,000 children not in school (nearly 25%) have been withdrawn from school by their parents and are being home educated in some way. So, in their case, absence from school does not mean absence from an education. Children being home-educated are supposed to be registered (and counted) by their local education authority, so we have some idea where these kids are.
The number of home-educated children has also doubled since the pandemic, as part of the wider trend of children not being in school and is also often related to the mental health or particular needs of the children involved.
Sometimes this move to home education will be a positive choice by the parents who may have particular reasons for choosing home education, but it is also often because parents feel that the mainstream education option is no longer working for their child and they feel that they have little other choice. It is not always a happy choice, in other words.
Children not in education…at all?
If you have been doing your maths you will realise that out of our original 400,000 children ‘not in school’ there are still some 300,000 who are not being home educated and are still unaccounted for. These are the children missing from education.
This estimate is significantly higher than the DfE’s official estimate and it is only an estimate – it may include some children being home educated but who are not registered for some reason. What we do know for sure is that this group is large, has been growing and that the destination of these children when they leave a school is unknown.
I read a lot of statistics, but I do find the idea that hundreds of thousands of children are not in education today as quite shocking. It’s a lot of children.
This number has risen substantially over the last five years. In their recent report, the EPI conclude that
“..our findings suggest that the number of children missing from education is a growing and persistent problem.”
It includes children who have been to school and then left, as well as children who never arrived in the first place. These children are not moving schools, or moving to Independent Schools or migrating, as most of this is already accounted for. These children are falling out of the mainstream education system altogether.
It is not only a very concerning educational challenge, it remains a safeguarding issue sometimes too. These concerns have been echoed recently by the Children’s Commissioner who has identified the same issues.
Who are the children missing from education?
The evidence gives us some idea, although it is not definitive.
There is a longstanding dissonance between mobile Roma and Traveller communities and settled mainstream schooling which we don’t seem to have ever properly addressed. Many of these children are educated for a while in schools, but often leave before the age of 16, never to return. Whilst this is a significant issue for these communities, they account for less than 5% of the national group of ‘children missing from education’ and are not typical of the challenges we are considering here.
Most typically, the children not in education today are likely to be:
Children with significant special educational needs and disabilities (‘SEND’) and with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) whose needs are not being met by their local school(s) and who are temporarily, or sometimes permanently, out of education
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds (eligible for Free School Meals)
Children who are (or have been) part of the care system
Children who have been excluded from school
Much of the evidence points to children being out of school because their needs could not be met within their school, rather than because of any positive choice by parents or carers to remove the child for a better alternative.
In other words, there is a sizeable unresolved problem here.
What can we do?
Such a challenge does not have a single answer, but we can see the key elements of it:
1 - Finding the children - We clearly need to get a better grip on understanding what’s happening and where children are; the official statistics are clearly inadequate. These are measurement and identification issues and there is growing agreement that these national systems need fixing. It should be difficult for a child to simply disappear ‘off the radar’.
2 - Resourcing our schools - Ensuring that mainstream schools have the attitudes, skills and funding to provide a high standard of education to a wide range of children, including those with more complex needs, is obviously a central part of the solution. It is better to prevent a child from disengaging from school in the first place than to have to re-engage them later. Some schools are already very good at this; too many are not.
A recent review of evidence[2] on how best to engage children and parents suggests that we don’t have much information about which strategies are effective. You get the feeling that this issue has never quite registered fully with Government.
3 - Adding in alternative provision - A further and complementary, part of the answer is to ensure that there are good quality ‘alternative provision’ educational options across the country for children who need additional support which a school may struggle to provide. This may only be temporary; sometimes timely support can equip a child to get back into mainstream schooling. It may not be realistic for schools to ‘do it all’, even with extra funding. Yet such alternative educational provision is presently a patchwork quilt across the country, with many holes in it.
‘No such thing as average’
If we recognise that our children come in different shapes and sizes and can have greatly varying needs, then it seems obvious that our education system also needs to be flexible enough to respond to this range of needs. It cannot simply be designed around ‘an average child’ because such a thing does not exist.
In fact, schools are usually pretty good at responding to a range of needs within their student communities, and they do it every day. But as we have seen in this blog, the number of children with more complex needs has been growing and something more is clearly needed. Business as usual is not working.
Whether or not a mainstream school can successfully educate every child is a difficult question which I am not qualified to answer, but whether the answer lies within schools or within complementary / alternative provision, or perhaps a hybrid solution – a greater variety of responses and services is needed.
Finding a way through
I was inspired to look into this subject after meeting with James, a former Headteacher who now spends part of his week voluntarily – and kindly – mediating between families and schools to try to prevent children from falling out of schooling, or getting back into it. James runs Finding Common Ground, a voluntary mediation project of his own initiative.
When I spoke with him, I was struck by how many families he talks to, how desperately challenging their circumstances can seem …and how broken the system must be if it requires unpaid volunteers to intervene to make it work.
What James and his project also showed me is that the creativity, innovation and skills for ‘fixing the system’ are already out there. Maybe this kind of purpose-driven expertise points towards a sustainable answer.
There is already a marketplace of ‘alternative provision’ out there providing education for children with different needs, funded by local education authorities. Expanding and strengthening this provision with a network of social-purpose educational enterprises would make it easier for parents to find local places for their children and increase the quality of what is on offer. This is the sort of thing that social enterprise is very good at - making a public service more responsive to local and specific needs and doing so in a financially sustainable way.
One such social enterprise is The Wildings – an alternative provision ‘forest school’ in rural Devon, set up as a Community Interest Company (CIC), which takes a small number of pupils who have been excluded from school, with a range of needs and all with EHCPs, and re-engages them in education. Their most recent Ofsted report says this:
The Wildings significantly changes pupils’ and families’ lives for the better. Nearly all pupils have been permanently excluded from other settings prior to joining. Some have missed large parts of their education. The Wildings throws a protective blanket around these pupils and allows them to flourish. It does so by quickly getting to know their personalities, backgrounds and interests….As a result, there is demonstrable improvement in pupils’ ability to manage their own behaviour over time.
(Ofsted, 2024)
It strikes me that this sector is a fruitful place for social investors to be looking, if they are interested in enabling long-term social impact.
There is still work to be done in mainstream schools in improving their engagement with pupils who are struggling – and still important work for mediators to do – but investing in a growing and more diverse network of complementary and purpose-driven provision also makes sense to me.
Final word…
There has been much discussion in recent years in how we make our public services more responsive to the varied needs that they seek to serve.
I think devolving decision making to a local level is crucial (as we have in this example, with local education authorities and schools). But I think opening up some provision to social-purpose enterprises is also part of the answer here too. It allows for a rich mix of responses, shaped by the creativity and passion of those who have the skills and the interest to meet those needs. Publicly funded services should be allowed to diverge in how they operate in different places, to meet different needs – the same aims, the same standards, but open to the possibility of different approaches.
There is no such thing as an average child.
There should be no such thing as an average public service.
This blog was written by Tim Thorlby. Please sign up if you’d like to know about future blogs, usually published once a month. (It’s free!)
Notes
[1] Crenna-Jennings, W, Joseph, A and Hutchinson, J (2024) Children missing from education, Education Policy Institute | Access here: https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/CME-report_final-1.pdf
[2] Education Endowment Foundation (2022) Attendance Interventions, Rapid Evidence Assessment, London: Education Endowment Foundation | Access: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/evidence-reviews/attendance-interventions-rapid-evidence-assessment