Children missing education remains one of the most urgent safeguarding and inclusion challenges facing local authorities, schools and partner agencies. An estimated 143,500 children were missing education at some point in 2024/25*. On the most recent census day in Autumn 2025, 34,700 were missing on a single day and 42% of those had been off the radar for more than 12 weeks.

Join Westminster Insight’s Children Missing Education Digital Conference, taking place online on Wednesday 30th September 2026, for a full day of policy clarity and practical advice.

Find out to prepare for the new duties under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, including the introduction of compulsory Children Not in School registers, the Single Unique Identifier across education, health and social care, and tighter checks before vulnerable children can be removed from school for home education. These checks were strengthened in direct response to the November 2025 Sara Sharif safeguarding review, which exposed how vulnerable children withdrawn for home education can slip out of sight.

Whether you work in a local authority, school, alternative provision or partner agency, you will gain expert advice and practical insight to help you identify, locate and support children missing from education. We will also examine how to effectively prevent children from disengaging with education, including engagement with SEND and early years services and elective home education teams ahead of school transition points.

Hear practical advice on multi-agency working with social care, police, health, and national organisations, including how to tackle CME linked to exploitation, county lines and safeguarding risk. We will set out how to make reasonable enquiries work in practice, what compliance looks like on admissions, off-rolling and notification, and how Ofsted is scrutinising local authority CME functions.

Bringing together senior policy voices, directors of children’s services, attendance and inclusion leads, safeguarding partners and frontline practitioners. Speakers will share creative methods for tracing children with unknown whereabouts, drawing on cross-agency checks, community intelligence and lessons from complex cases involving mobility, migration and disengaged families.

You will also hear about effective approaches to engaging with families and reaching children at higher risk of CME, including refugee, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities and families affected by poverty.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to examine the true scale of CME and what reasonable enquiries, multi-agency working and family engagement look like in the toughest cases.

*DfE Children Missing Education release, 2024/2025

Key Points

• Understanding the definitions and main drivers of CME
• Implementing the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026: Not in School registers, Single Unique Identifier (SUI) and the rollout timetable
• New duties on Elective Home Education, including additional checks for vulnerable children
• Legal duties and updates relating to identification, support and prevention of CME
• Strengthening reasonable enquiries and statutory compliance on admissions, off-rolling and notification
• Information sharing and multi-agency working at local and national level: working with schools, local authorities, police, MASH, NHS England, HMRC, DWP and Border Force
• Tackling CME linked to exploitation, county lines and safeguarding risk
• Effective approaches to engaging with families and reaching refugee, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities and families affected by poverty
• Implications of Ofsted’s updated ILACS framework and the Ofsted/CQC Children Not in School thematic reviews
• Creative approaches and best practice examples from real cases of locating and reintegrating children back into education
• Frameworks and self-assessment tools to review and benchmark your CME processes