Listen to this story Members can listen to an AI-generated audio version of this article. 1.0x Audio narration uses an AI-generated voice. 0:00 0:00 Become a member to listen to this article Subscribe England’s councils could face an uphill battle when creating compulsory registers of children not in school after a Welsh pilot found it took staff a “disproportionate effort relative to the value of the results”. The children’s wellbeing and schools bill will create a duty for councils in England and Wales to produce a dataset for all children of a compulsory school age who are not registered, after numbers out of school have risen rapidly in recent years. Department for Education data suggests there were 117,000 children (CME) in 2022-23. But research by the Education Policy Institute in 2024 suggests that could be closer to 300,000. The department said there was an “urgent need for local authorities to be able to better identify these children” and to take safeguarding action on cases where children were not receiving a suitable education or were at risk of harm. Councils will also have to assess the home learning environment of children placed on the register within 15 days. But a that sought to create a similar database found the task was burdensome, with one council estimating it would take up to 500 hours to compile the data. How did the pilot work? The pilot was rolled out across seven local authority areas in Wales: Cardiff, Carmarthenshire, Gwynedd, the Isle of Anglesey, Monmouthshire, Powys and Rhondda Cyon Taff. The register required data to be collected from the NHS and local independent schools, and then matched with council records. From this, the register would include the relevant child’s name, address and date of birth. By matching datasets from multiple agencies, the hope was to find children missing in education, which staff could then investigate. Councils were given a six-week window between April and May 2025 to create the databases. ‘Erroneous’ data However many found it challenging. While the Welsh government wrote to all relevant independent schools across the local authorities, only a few provided data by the deadline. After the transfer of NHS data went more smoothly, councils expressed concerns that it was “erroneous”. Matching the data “required weeks or even months of effort, often by small teams or individual officers working beyond normal hours”, the pilot evaluation said. In one area, a quarter of the NHS data received had to be manually matched, while another authority estimated it would require nearly 500 hours to match all the data. Some councils suggested this was a “disproportionate effort relative to the value of the results obtained, consuming staff time and being heavily dependent on specialist staff with data–handling expertise”. Five of the seven pilot councils identified 6,386 CME cases. Overall, the evaluation found that “while the database offered potential to improve data sharing between health and education, its immediate contribution to identifying new CME was limited due to the quality and timeliness of the information provided”. The government has said its plans in England would not require the NHS or schools to give information to councils. Instead, parents of children not in school will have to provide details, including their child’s name and address, date of birth and basic details about their education. Ministers also plan to create a single unique identifier for children so their data is better linked between departments and services. The NHS number is a potential identifier, but the government is yet to flesh out its plans. Plans worry campaigners Data privacy campaigners remained concerned about the proposals, fearing any new database could be misused. Jen Persson, the chief executive of the digital safety campaign group Defend Digital Me, said the conclusions of the Welsh pilot were “at best underwhelming, saying it was worthwhile in principle, if not yet in practice”. “While our current government is using data to find people, describing it only as something for good and for the children, the same infrastructure can be used to find anyone for other purposes. “It does not help children as much as the state, and we need to democratically set its limits, and demand accountable oversight and safeguards.” A DfE spokesperson said the registers “will ensure we help stop vulnerable children falling through the cracks and help councils take action to support children who are not receiving a suitable education”. The department would provide extra funding, guidance and training to councils ahead of any implementation. The children’s wellbeing and schools bill is at its third reading in the Commons, after being passed in the House of Lords.