Extract from report stage (Lords) (day 2) of the Schools Bill - July 18

Lord Storey (LD):...Over the last seven or eight years, I have put down a whole series of Written Questions asking how many children are missing from our school rolls, such that we do not even know where they are. The answer is that we do not know. The best we can do currently—this goes back to 2018-19—is information from the National Crime Agency  which, by the way, identifies as missing anyone whose whereabouts cannot be established and who may be the subject of a crime or at risk of harm to themselves; examples include child trafficking, getting involved in drug pushing, et cetera. It concluded that there are 216,707 children missing whose whereabouts we do not know. That is a very low figure. I think it is considerably higher than that...

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