The Education Secretary has vowed to step up efforts to return 100,000 “ghost” children to school post-lockdown in the wake of the murder of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes.
Nadhim Zahawi on Monday assured MPs that the Department for Education was working closely with other agencies to identify and monitor thousands of children who have dropped off the radar during the pandemic.
It came after Robert Halfon, the Tory chairman of the Commons education committee, urged Mr Zahawi to “proactively” work with local authorities and schools to ensure vulnerable children “are being watched by those authorities when they need to be watched”.
Mr Halfon referred to the estimated 100,000 pupils who are still mostly absent from school as “ghost children”, adding that they were “potentially subject to safeguarding hazards, county lines gangs, online harm and, of course, awful domestic abuse”.
Updating MPs on the national review into the six-year-old’s death at the hands of his parents, Mr Zahawi replied: “He is absolutely right to raise this issue. It is a concerning issue and it is a focus for my department.
‘Weakened the system’
“I am working closely with other departments and agencies to work through this. The tragedy for Arthur was he was never off the school register. But nevertheless the case he makes is an important one.”
Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, also acknowledged on Sunday that lockdowns had “weakened the system of support” across the country, warning it was vital that Boris Johnson did not close schools again.
Their fears are borne out by figures published by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel in January, which revealed that the number of reported incidents of children dying or being seriously harmed after suspected abuse or neglect rose by a quarter after England’s first lockdown in 2020.
Separately, Mr Zahawi confirmed, as first revealed by The Telegraph, that the review would look at how social workers could be freed up from desk work to spend more time “with families and protecting children”.
Speaking earlier in the day, Sir Michael Wilshaw, the former head of Ofsted, said that too many “inexperienced” social workers “straight out of university” were being asked to deal with “manipulative” parents such as Arthur’s.
“If the system is going to work, these young social workers need to be well-trained, but [they also] need to be supported by senior managers, not just the director of children’s services, but senior managers who need to pick up when things are going wrong, listen to what was happening in the case of Arthur, and hold an immediate review,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“And that obviously didn’t happen here in Solihull, and it’s not happening across the country. So the quality of oversight from senior managers is absolutely critical to the support for these children.”
