Revealed: Britain's 100,000 'invisible' teenage dropouts | UK News | The Observer
Revealed: Britain's 100,000 'invisible' teenage dropouts
Anushka Asthana and Jo Revill on a shocking new study that finds thousands of youngsters give education a miss - and are then lost and cut loose without help
Sunday May 6, 2007
The Observer
When Kim Page turned 14 she met an older crowd. Tempted by a lifestyle hanging around the local park, pubs and clubs, she soon lost interest in her family and school friends. Late nights made the mornings difficult for Kim, now 18. Sometimes, when her parents, Becky and Bruce, came to try to wake her up, she had not yet made it to bed. Kim started making excuses to avoid school. At first she would go in late, at 10am, then 11am. At 14 she stopped going altogether. When the country welcomed her year's GCSE results to much fanfare, Kim was nowhere to be seen.
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Today The Observer can reveal the truth about the nation's invisible children; tens of thousands of pupils who simply disappear from the school rolls each year. Kim is just one of a growing and disturbing trend. They are the truants who never come back, the excluded, the bullied, the sick, the carers, the abused, those on witness protection programmes and many more. This month Wasted Education, a shocking report from the think-tank the Bow Group, will reveal that in England:
· Last year 15,000 children in their GCSE year were missing from school registers.
· Nearly 6,000 of them who were 14 in 2005 had 'disappeared' within a year.
· When it came to exams, more than 70,000 pupils who should have been taking them did not turn up.
· Twenty thousand pupils did not sit GCSE maths and 26,700 missed out on English.
'There are certain groups in society who have fallen so far below the radar that politicians are not aware they exist,' said Chris Skidmore, co-author of the report and political officer at the Bow Group, which is close to the Conservative Party. 'These are the lost children. If you compare the number who were at school three years ago and the number who are 16 now, you see them dropping off the rolls fairly dramatically. Others never turn up to exams.'
Although a few of the children will be home-schooled, government estimates suggest that this only accounts for between 636 and 3,180 in each year. Few people know where the rest are.
One 10-year-old boy from North Wales, who cannot be named, went missing from school two years ago. When he was eventually found, it turned out he was being used as a drugs runner for criminal gangs in the area.
'It was one of the most extreme cases I had ever seen,' said a child protection officer. 'Every time he left his house he would be picked up in a car by drug dealers who were using him. He just stopped turning up for school.'
In another case, a 15-year-old girl from Manchester started having panic attacks because she was being violently bullied at school. She remains too scared to go back.
Skidmore blamed a 'relentless focus upon academic curriculum' for failing to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of children like these. He also criticised the government for focusing too strongly on A to C grades and failing to look at the children who did not even achieve a G.
In deprived wards in Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham, the performance using the A-G measure, which reveals the number of pupils passing any kind of exam, has actually fallen, the study said.
The report will form part of the think-tank's 'Invisible Nation' series that will be launched in a magazine of the same name this week. 'My father served as a doctor in Vietnam,' said Charlotte Leslie, editor of the magazine and a Conservative candidate for Bristol North West. 'When assisting war-blasted casualties, he said that you should treat first, not the ones who are screaming, but the ones who are not screaming because they are really in trouble. There are members of our society who have quite simply stopped screaming. Being compassionate means hearing that silence and going to help.'
In Takeley, Essex, at the headquarters of the Inclusion Trust, a charity that tries to find and support 'missing children', the staff make their way through large numbers of emails and letters from desperate parents every day. Occasionally a child walks through the door and asks for help itself.
Professor Stephen Heppell, chair of the trustees, estimates that there are 100,000 'invisible children'. 'These kids could fill Wembley,' he said. 'There is clearly a sense of crisis. The tragedy is that the costs of social deprivation repeating itself over and over are enormous. Even if we only cared about the bank notes, it would still be worth tackling this.'
His charity is helping 1,000 children through an initiative called 'Not School'. Teenagers are given a new computer through which they log on to a school system that lets them study the subjects they want in the time scale they choose. They are in constant email contact with 'mentors' and 'experts', some of whom are based in New Zealand to ensure there is somebody that they can contact 24 hours a day.
Next month the trust will publish a major report revealing the results of a £15m project that has been running for seven years into how to help these particular children.
According to Heppell, he has a solution that could instantly pull 50,000 of the missing children back into mainstream society. 'I genuinely feel like I have got a syringe in my hand that can help people and I am being asked to play darts with it,' said Heppell. One person they were able to help was Kim.
When she stopped going to school she spent much of the day watching daytime television at home and then joined her friends at night. 'We would just hang around the streets all night, chat, sometimes drink alcohol or go to the pub,' she said. 'I could not be bothered getting up in the morning, and I kept thinking of excuses. Most of the time during the day I just sat at home.' Becky and Bruce attended meetings with the local authority, although she never came with them. At lunchtime her father would come home and beg her to go in, but she refused. But somehow Not School offered her something that she was interested in.
'It meant I didn't have to get up early and did not have to do it in one block every day,' said Kim. 'I learnt loads of things - English, biology, childcare, hair dressing, maths and French.'
Instead of being given a timetable, Kim chose what she wanted to study and when. In the end she was able to persuade a local college to accept her study as an alternative to GCSEs and was given a place. Now she is preparing to go to university to study psychology.
But there are tens of thousands of missing children who never get any help. According to Jean Johnson, chief executive of the Inclusion Trust, the government is not honest when it says that 'every child matters'. 'The truth is the sort of children we deal with are not welcome in schools. Most of these children don't matter. It is an astonishing waste of talent.'
Others agreed. Frank Field, the former Welfare Minister, said that in 10 years of Labour in power the taxpayer had spent £11bn on pupils who left school with no qualifications at all. 'I have met some unbelievably bright children who've left school with no qualifications, and it is not that they have failed but that our system has failed them,' he said.
He believes that the government should put more effort into providing technical academies for vocational education which would help children who were no so academic.
A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said it had been doing a huge amount to help such troubled teenagers. 'Record investment, radical reform and the hard work of teachers and pupils have delivered a massive improvement in school standards since 1997,' he said. 'Some 86,000 more pupils now achieve five good GCSEs than did in 1997, and more than 81,000 pupils are entered for GCSE exams than were 10 years ago.
'However, we are never complacent when it comes to bringing on the talents of all our young people, tackling educational inequality and improving social mobility. This is why we are spending £1bn to personalise learning, identify pupils who are struggling earlier, and provide catch-up classes or one-to-one tuition where children are falling behind.'
Kim's life is now back on track. However, for tens of thousands of others, the future ahead does not seem so bright.
The lost boys and girls
100,000 The number of children missing from school
70,000 Number of teenagers who should have taken GCSEs last year but never turned up
15,000 Number of missing 15- and 16-year-olds who are not registered at a school
5,800 The number of children, aged 14 in 2005, who disappeared from the school rolls in the following year
20,000 - 26,700 The number of pupils who do not sit GCSE maths and English each year
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