School aged children missing from education

1. Provide the total number of school-aged children recorded as missing from education in the academic year due to end in July. Please also provide figures for the previous three academic years (2017/18, 18/19 and 19/20).

Children are recorded as “missing from education” if they are of compulsory school age, and the authorities are unable to trace them – typically for four weeks or more, or two to three days in the case of vulnerable children. 

Please note Children in Devon are recorded as missing education if they are not school roll for any period of time (ie less than 4 weeks and even if we know where they are). This does not match your typical example above. The below table shows the total number of children who over the course of the academic year were at any point missing education. The majority of these children were CME (Children Missing Education) for a short period of time, eg due to house move etc. 

2017/18 2018/19 2019/20 2020/21
581 503 525 481

2. Provide the total number of school-aged children recorded as missing from education in the academic year due to end in July who could not be traced at all (they were not found). Please also provide figures for the previous three academic years (2017/18, 18/19 and 19/20).

Devon County Council has a policy that all cases are kept as an open case until they are found (these cases are included in the above numbers).  At the end of the academic year 2021 there were 12 children whose location we had so far not been able to locate.