The children’s commissioner for England has backed mandatory tracking of youngsters by local authorities, saying no one knows how many children there are in the country.
The recommendation came in a report initiated by Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner, which surveyed all 151 English local authorities and found many did not have figures for the number of children being home-schooled or attending independent schools in their region.
The survey also found that most councils relied on updated census figures from the Office for National Statistics to estimate how many children were in the local authority, although a few also used GP enrolments or other data.
Read the full article in the guardian here.
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