06 October 2006
Government guidelines to ensure no child misses out on an education are being ignored by up to 84% of local authorities, research for the Department for Education and Skills has found.
The guidelines were issued in 2004 as part of the Every Child Matters programme. They set out how all English local education authorities should identify which children were not receiving an education and how they should actively intervene to ensure they are either brought into school or an alternative education provider.
But two years on, researchers have found that only 17% of authorities actually have a written policy on children missing education and only 16% monitor the pace at which such children are successfully moved into education.
Researchers surveyed 129 English LEAs. While 94% had implemented a guideline stating they should have a named contact point to receive information on such children, only 27% regularly monitored their local situation and 58% had no record of children who left school without going to a known alternative.
A spokeswoman for the Local Government Association told Public Finance: 'The guidelines are non-statutory and that has created a problem for local authorities in getting partners – such as schools and the police – to implement them and provide authorities with the information they need.
'There has been a lack of clarity over who is responsible for what.'
The government intends to make the guidelines statutory from 2007, putting a legal duty on all local authorities to ensure no child misses an education. The LGA said that would resolve many of the blocks to implementation.
But the researchers also found that many local authorities were not clear how the guidelines should be interpreted. A number felt that as long as a child was on a school roll, they did not need to be monitored.
Others wrongly believed the guidelines applied only to missing children such as runaways, and in other areas data protection continued to be a 'smoke screen' standing in the way of effective information-sharing about children at risk.
A Department for Education and Skills spokesman said: 'We welcome the good progress that many authorities have already made but there is much more to do. That is why Clause 4 of the Education and Inspections Bill will place a new statutory duty on local authorities to identify children missing education.'
PFoct2006
