Dame Rachel and The Missing Children (Part 2)

Carlita, Year 5, was lucky. One afternoon she came home from school to find all her possessions on the pavement. (Carlita is not her real name.) The next day her teacher, who did not know the situation, kept her in at break time to do the homework she had missed, but unlike thousands of other children in her situation Carlita continued to attend school without missing a beat.

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has launched an enquiry to find out what’s happened to 80,000 – 100,000 “children who have ‘fallen off the radar’ and not returned to the classroom after lockdown.” The implication is that children missing school is a new phenomenon and is the parents’ or childrens’ choice. In reality, as we saw last week, the problem is far bigger than Dame Rachel pretends and is overwhelmingly the fault of unwelcoming schools and academy chains.

For many youngsters the trauma of eviction – being abruptly removed from familiar surroundings, friends and home comforts – is also the start of an extended period out of school. Notoriously, this is the case for thousands of Looked After Children, a shameful scandal I wrote about two years ago. In 2019 two reports were published about the experience of children in care, No Place At Home from the Children’s Society and Pass The Parcel from the then Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield.

Between them these reports told us of 40% of Looked After Children accommodated outside their home area (around 30,000 children) some of whom spoke “casually… about moving home 10, 11 or even 15 times (numbers which we know can go much higher). We found that over half of children placed out of area have 2 or more moves within 2 years.” And one consequence of this is: “The children and young people that we spoke to often mentioned that their education had been disrupted due to their placement moves…  One young person who had been in out of area placements for over two years told us that she had only spent two weeks of this time in mainstream education”.

Many of the 200,000 homeless children in temporary accommodation are also accommodated out of area, moved several times and find their education severely disrupted. The biggest difference is that homeless children are not normally taken away from parents. In addition, while Looked after Children can be in Local Authority care for a decade or more, homelessness does not usually last so long, though it does affect huge numbers of children.

Today’s figure of 200,000 homeless children is a 48% increase over 2019’s 135,000 and many of this year’s homeless will be different children from those in 2019 and 2023, so the issue will affect well over a million of our present generation of schoolchildren. I can find no figures and no proper research into how many of these children miss out big time on school. Some Local Authorities will handle this better than others, and some schools are truly welcoming to new arrivals, but my experience, and the experiences of children I have taught, suggest that for the large majority being rendered homeless will cause them to lose significant swathes of their education before they reach 16.

 (The figures for homeless children are calculated by Shelter and apply to Great Britain: England, Scotland and Wales. Shelter’s report in 2019 showed that England has 86.7% of Great Britain’s population but 93.7% of its homeless children.)

The reason moving around the country means that children miss out on school is succinctly explained by UNICEF in a 2018 report on the experiences of refugee children – another group for whom moving often means missing out on long periods of school. UNICEF conducted a survey of recent arrivals in which 86 young people took part: “At the secondary level, only 14% of respondents… started school within 20 days, with 33% waiting over 3 months (one young person waited 9 months for a place and two waited almost 5 months).”  This is a small sample, but there is no reason to think it untypical, particularly as one factor that UNICEF highlights in explanation is “an increasingly fragmented admissions system” an issue which also concerns the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA).

If school admissions in England worked as The School Admissions Code says it should, every school application would be resolved within 15 school days, which is 3 school weeks. This is in itself a significant chunk of teaching and learning to lose: a parent taking a child out of school for a 3 week holiday would expect a hefty fine. But unfortunately, the OSA tells us, in its 2019 annual report, this system doesn’t work as it should and the three week loss of learning often turns into many months.

Refugees arriving in an area, Children in Care being moved around the system and children being evicted from their homes, are not neatly organised to take up school places in September. They are almost invariably “in-year” admissions and, unlike admissions at the start of Year R and Year 7, no-one coordinates in-year admissions. Most faith schools as well as all academies are responsible for their own admissions and between them these comprise around half of all primary schools and over 80% of secondaries. The result is a system unfit for purpose, one which is open to abuse by unscrupulous schools or academy chains on tight budgets and overly concerned about league table standings and Ofsted gradings.

Children in the three groups discussed in this blog have suffered trauma. In addition: 56% of Looked after Children have Special Educational Needs or Disabilities; homeless children come from poor families (rich people don’t tend to get evicted); many refugees require teachers with ESOL skills. All three groups are made up of children whom some schools might wish to discourage from harming their statistics. The result is quite literally tens of thousands of children missing school. Think of these children next time you hear a minister or a prime minister weeping crocodile tears about “the attainment gap”.

And, yes, unfair detention and all, Carlita was luckier than she may ever know.

CLA5: The Campaign

In the last two weeks 9 Local Authorities (LAs) have written to me pledging to process all in-year admissions for looked after children within 5 days, or to ensure that all such children are in school within 10 days, or both.  I call this the CLA5 commitment.  In addition, 3 other LAs have not made the commitment but pointed out that in practice they deal with these admissions within 7 days (2/3 in one case), and 2 Anglican dioceses have committed to encourage the schools they control, and which are their own admission authorities, to meet these timescales.

This is important because literally thousands of these very vulnerable young people are missing out, or have missed out, on months of school at a time.  I wrote about some children I knew personally who were in this position, here, and about the general problem here.  

If a parent takes a child on holiday in term time the law says they should expect to be fined.  We believe their right to an education is being infringed.  Yet we turn a blind eye to the fact that many children for whom local authorities assume the role of parents (CLA) seem to thereby lose their right to schooling.  Somehow these very vulnerable children are expected to cope, where others who are more secure and perhaps higher achieving, cannot.  The Schools Admission Code says CLA children should be the top priority: they go to the front of every queue; schools may admit them even if the school is full or an infant class is already at 30.  CLA attract the highest pupil premium funding. But all this is window dressing, because the simple fact is that many of these children are losing out by not being in school.

Writing a blog or two seems a completely inadequate response to this situation.  I wrote to the Secretary of State, to Ofsted and to the Shadow Secretary of State, because only the Government could solve the problem completely, but even if it chose to do so the wheels of Government grind slowly, so I decided to ask individual LAs, Church Dioceses, Multi-Academy Trusts and schools to make the CLA5 commitment.  

The letters I wrote, and the responses I have received so far, are set out on a blog which can be found at cla5.org

The education community could solve this scandal by welcoming children without delay.  I know for a fact that in most circumstances this isn’t hard to do.  As a head I never delayed giving a response about the admission of a looked after child and never turned one away.  My wife, who ran three schools where I was responsible for only one, did the same.  And we are not exceptional.  Many, many headteachers have exactly the same approach.

There are particular strains in some areas.  Literally dozens of young people are sent to Kent when they are taken into care, and some school leaders here complain that they are asked to shoulder a disproportionate load.  It was for this reason that I wrote to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, asking that schools which are welcoming to CLA should be given credit for this in inspection judgements.  Of course, someone should be looking at why this is happening and trying to solve this issue. But whether or not either of these are done, I would ask school leaders to remember that the situation is never the children’s fault, and before they turn up at your gate they have already been through an experience which may well have left them traumatised.

Thank you to Cheshire West and Chester, Devon, Hillingdon, Kensington and Chelsea, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Nottingham City, Reading, Swindon, Warrington and Westminster LAs, as well as the Dioceses of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich (Suffolk) and Exeter.  To really help Looked After Children we need every Local Authority, every Diocese, every MAT and every school in the country to make the CLA5 commitment.

If you agree with the aims of this campaign, and would like to help, please consider asking your own LA, Diocese, MAT or school to make the commitment.  There are more than 20,000 state schools in the country.  It will take me a while to contact them on my own and I would be grateful for some help.

There are further details about all of this, including a sample letter/e-mail on cla5.org 

A coda to my New Year Challenge

Last week I wrote a blog about looked after children.  Today I met a former colleague for lunch and listened open-mouthed and with growing anger as she told me what happened to a family of four children taken into care at the start of last term. 

First, of course, they were split up.  Few placements will take four siblings together.  Then they were sent, separately, to foster carers in distant counties.  The eldest boy ran away several times, and each time attempted to reach his home.  After six weeks the parents regained custody and the children came home.  None of the four had spent a single day in school in the entire six weeks.

I know these children.  The three youngest are hard-working, quiet, sensible and keen to please, the eldest is confused, unhappy and sometimes needs coaxing.  None of them has any special needs; they would not disrupt a classroom, or hold back anyone else’s learning.  In short, there is no reason why any school should hesitate before offering them a place.

At the worst time in their young lives, when their family life was ripped apart, their friends and comfortable routines were torn from them and left far behind, our system decided to hammer these children further by damaging their education and harming their life chances. 

In my blog I urged school leaders to open their hearts and the doors of their schools to vulnerable children like these.  Please.  Let’s do it.

A Challenge for the New Year

This New Year, let’s resolve to do what we in education can to make the lives of vulnerable children better.

Within weeks one summer, we said farewell to a looked after child in Year 3 who left for a new life on the east coast, and welcomed a Year 5 who joined us from a city fifty miles to the south.  There are 30,000 children in care, 41% of the total, who are placed outside the area “they would call home” and “Pass The Parcel”  is a shamefully apt name for the report on their experiences published by Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, on Christmas Eve.

For a child, being placed in care is traumatic.  I have known children removed from their families for all sorts of reasons: after child pornography was found on a parent’s phone, for example, or parents were arrested for drug offences.  More than one child I know has suffered the anguish of finding a parent unconscious after a suicide attempt, and several times children themselves disclosed sexual or physical abuse.  Almost forty years ago, a boy I taught was held at gunpoint by his father in a stand-off with police.  But whatever the immediate trigger, being in care is NEVER the child’s fault.

In emergency, the social workers look not for what is ideal but for what is possible.  So it’s no surprise that initial placements can be miles away.  But, as a report from the Children’s Society revealed in September 2019, a long term placement at a distance adds to the children’s distress and brings with it huge dangers.  

11,000 children are in care more than 20 miles from their former homes and 2,000 are a hundred miles away.  “Record numbers” of these “are going missing,” the Children’s Society says. We don’t know how many, because the DfE doesn’t publish the figures, but there are more than 70,000 “missing incidents” annually, and the number is rising.  Many looked after children run away because they are unhappy – often trying to run home – others are enticed away to be exploited. 

Of the children in care placed out of their area, 52% have special educational needs and almost half of these (24% of the total) have social emotional and mental health identified as their primary need.  And moving area compromises both educational chances and treatment on the NHS.  These highly vulnerable children are often left without a school place for months on end, and while children typically wait many months for a CAMHS appointment, those who move district go to the back of the queue every time.  The Children’s Commissioner’s report comments: “We heard teens casually talking about having to move home 10, 11 or even 15 times (numbers which we know can go much higher).  We found that over half of children placed out of area have 2 or more moves within 2 years.”  The wait for therapy which was already far too long at months, becomes years, and sometimes never.

There are good reasons why some children have to be placed in care “out of area”.  For example, some children have to go for their own safety as they are being targeted by others locally. But too often the problem is simply a lack of placements, which comes down to a lack of resources. Bluntly, some authorities are trying to save money by exporting what they see as a “problem”, and as with everything, some areas are more affected than others (Kent and Lincolnshire import four times more children in care than they export).  However, as the Children’s Society declares, this “is a national scandal”. Vulnerable children “are suffering additional trauma because local authorities – the very people tasked with keeping them safe – are sending them away.”.

“Pass The Parcel” has several recommendations, most of them for action by the Government.  But we, as educators could do our bit, starting in January.  Without delay we could make some children’s lives immeasurably better with three simple steps.

1. School leaders, open your arms.  The Admission’s Code gives theoretical priority to children in care and those with EHCPs.  Make this theory a reality and stop putting barriers between vulnerable children and school. 
2. Ofsted, stop penalising schools which take in vulnerable children: reward them instead.
3. Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, drop your objection to children being placed in schools that Ofsted describes as Requires Improvement.

Shockingly, some of the young people spoken to for “Pass the Parcel” believed that their experiences were so awful they were “punishment” for things the children themselves had done.  Let’s end this national scandal in 2020.