"Nearly two million in England failing to attend school regularly while study authors call rise in home education 'alarming'. A fifth of all children have been “missing” from school since the pandemic, a major report has found. There has been a “dramatic increase” in the number of youngsters being home educated driven by parents pulling their children out of school following lockdown, according to a new study by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). Nearly two million of England’s nine million pupils are failing to attend school regularly, according to its analysis of the latest official figures. This includes 1.67 million children classified by the Department for Education (DfE) as “persistently absent” during the autumn term of 2021, an increase of 82 per cent from the previous year. It also takes into account the 81,000 who are home educated which the report notes is an “alarming” 34 per cent higher than before the pandemic. “In some areas, the total number of children in home education more than doubled,” the CSJ found. “At present, half of all children taught at home were found to have begun their retreat from the classroom during lockdowns.”
