Children missing education (CME): procedures and policies

The information in this article comes from guidance for local authorities (LAs) and schools on Children Missing Education (CME) and Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2023. 

Understand your attendance and registration requirements

Know and follow your LA's procedures

This is because your LA has a legal responsibility to:

• Identify any pupil who is of compulsory school age and not receiving education
• Get these pupils back into education

Monitor attendance through your daily register

You must:

• Enter pupils on the register every day that the school has agreed or been notified that the pupil will attend
• Address poor or irregular attendance
• Refer poor attendance to your LA (more on this below)
• Investigate any unexplained absences as part of your wider safeguarding duties
• Keep your admission register accurate and up to date

You should agree with your LA the intervals at which you’ll inform the LA of the details of pupils who:

• Fail to attend regularly
• Have missed 10 schools days or more without permission (or because of illness, unavoidable cause, a religious holiday or the LA’s failure to make the required travel arrangements)

Keep your admission register accurate and up to date

Enter new pupils onto your register as soon as they start

If you're told that a new pupil will be joining your school, but the pupil doesn't attend on the agreed date, you should try to establish the child's whereabouts and consider alerting the LA.

If a pupil starts at your school and the previous school is unknown, you should let your LA know so they can search for the previous school in the DfE's school to school (S2S) system.

Remind parents/carers to tell you about any changes to their information

You could do this via existing communications such as emails and newsletters. This will help you (and your LA) when enquiring about missing children.

Look to hold more than 1 emergency contact number for each pupil, to help you get in touch with an adult if you have any concerns.

As soon as a parent or carer tells you about a change of address for a pupil, you must record the following in your admission register:

• The full name of the parent/carer with whom the pupil will live
• The new address
• The date from when it's expected the pupil will live at this address

Where a pupil is registered at another school or will be attending one in future, you must record in your register:

• The name of the new school
• The date when the pupil has started, or is due to start, attending their new school

Understand your duty to share information about non-standard transitions

If a pupil's name is added to your school roll

If this happens at a non-standard transition point (for example, joining mid-year or leaving before your school's final year), you must:

• Notify your LA within 5 days
• Provide your LA with all the information held within the admission register about the pupil 

If a pupil's name is to be removed from the school roll

You must inform your LA of all deletions from your admission register when a pupil is taken off roll (this doesn't apply where a pupil's name is deleted after they've completed the final year at your school). 

If at a non-standard transition point, you must tell your LA immediately and provide them the following information: 

• The pupil’s full name
• The full name and address of any parent/carer with whom the pupil lives
• At least 1 phone number for the parent/carer the pupil lives with
• The full name and address of the parent/carer the pupil is going to live with, and the date the pupil is expected to start living there (if applicable)
• The name of the pupil's destination school and the pupil's expected start date (if applicable)
• The ground in regulation 8 of the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006 under which the pupil's name is to be removed from the register

Timing is important: you must notify the LA as soon as the ground for removal is met, and no later than the time at which the pupil’s name is removed from the register.

Read more about removing a pupil from the school roll. 

Make 'reasonable enquiries' for pupils who aren't attending

Where a pupil:

• Has not returned to school for 10 days after an authorised absence, or 
• Has been absent without authorisation for 20 consecutive days

You can remove them from your register only when you've failed to establish their whereabouts, after making 'reasonable enquiries', jointly with your LA, to locate them. This only applies if you don’t have reasonable grounds to believe that the pupil is unable to attend because of sickness or another unavoidable cause.

You must make these enquiries.

‘Reasonable enquiries’ when the whereabouts of a child are unclear or unknown, might include completing and recording 1 or more of the following:

• Contacting parents, relatives and neighbours using known contact details
• Checking local databases within the LA, or the DfE's Key to Success or school2school systems
• Following local information sharing arrangements, making enquiries to:
• Other local databases and agencies
• Agencies known to be involved with the family
• Checking with UK Visas and Immigration and/or the Border Force
• Checking with the LA and school from which your pupil moved from originally, or any past LAs or schools that have educated your pupil
• Checking with the LA where your pupil lives, if it's different from the one where your school is
• In the case of children of service personnel, checking with the Ministry of Defence Children’s Education Advisory Service
• Conducting a home visit, following your own policies and risk assessment procedures. If appropriate, making enquiries with neighbours and relatives

If you still aren't able to locate a pupil (and neither can your LA), you can remove them from your register (as set out above).

Know the pupils who are most at risk of going missing from education 

They are children who:

• Are at risk of harm or neglect
• Come from Gypsy, Roma or Traveller families
• Come from the families of service personnel
• Go missing or run away from home or care
• Are supervised by the youth justice system
• Cease to attend a school
• Come from new migrant families

Where a pupil needs a social worker, this should inform your decisions about responding to unauthorised absence or to the pupil missing education where there are known safeguarding risks (paragraph 173, KCSIE 2023). 

You don't need a CME policy, but staff need to know about your CME procedures 

While a CME policy isn't in the DfE's list of statutory policies and documents, statutory guidance Keeping Children Safe in Education expects:

• Schools to have appropriate safeguarding measures in place to respond to children who are absent from education, particularly repeatedly and/or for prolonged periods, and missing education
• All staff to be aware of the school's unauthorised absence procedures and children missing education procedures
• All staff to be aware that children absent from education and missing education can be a vital warning sign of a range of safeguarding issues

You can create a standalone CME policy or include this as part of your child protection policy.

Use appendix 4 of our model child protection policy to help you. 

See examples of policies from schools 

Primary schools 

• Oxenhope CofE Primary School, Bradford (see page 29 of the 'child protection and safeguarding policy')
• St Peter's Cross Keys C of E Academy  (see appendix 28 of the 'child protection and safeguarding policy')

Secondary schools

• Heathcote School and Science College, Waltham Forest (see page 18 of the 'attendance policy')
• The Campion School, Hornchurch (see page 24 of the 'safeguarding and child protection policy')

Special schools

• White Spire School, Milton Keynes (see 'children missing in education policy')
• The Redway School, Milton Keynes (see 'child missing in education')

Save time and stay compliant with The Key Safeguarding

If you're a Whole School member, or have Leaders+ membership with access to The Key Leaders and The Key Safeguarding, you can use our resources to support you with all of your safeguarding training – including on CME. Access:

• INSET day safeguarding training
• eLearning for all staff, including refresher training for designated safeguarding leads
• Factsheets explaining specific safeguarding issues for staff and parents, including CME
• Safeguarding scenarios to test how staff would act in a potential safeguarding situation, including CME