The Children who are Actually Missing from Education

Could this be co-incidence or is it really just a slice of ordinary life? At dinner last night we were regaled by stories of such an intensity of violence and bull-headed idiocy, that you would honestly have thought the protagonists had been caught up in some ghastly dystopian (mot du jour round here) Hollywood B movie. And then again today, we hear yet more stories of young people fighting, mugging one another, smoking, drinking, using gratuitously foul language, engaging in acts of vandalism and theft; and the setting for all this? Yes, you guessed it, SCHOOL.

I came in here to calm down, but it only gets worse as by what is more certainly a coincidence, someone had sent me a passage from the DFES Children Missing From Education Initiative:

"Children missing from education in this document, refers to all children of compulsory school age who are not on a school role (sic), not being educated otherwise (e.g.privately or in alternative provision) and who have been out of any educational provision for a substantial period of time (usually agreed as four weeks or more.)"

I guess I should be grateful that this paragraph is succinct and comprehensible because most of the rest of the document isn't, being replete with diagrams that make a simple situation almost impenetrable, and abstract pronouncements that could mean almost anything or absolutely nothing. It is the actually the content of this paragragh that should make any right-minded person want to scream.

CHILDREN MISSING FROM EDUCATION???? You want to know exactly where they are? I'll tell you: they're RIGHT UNDER YOUR NOSE.