New attendance registers to stop ‘ghost children’ falling through the net

100,000 pupils have been missing from school rolls during the past two years. The Government has announced that a national register would be introduced to assess how many pupils were not in school across the country. The Schools White Paper announced that laws would be introduced to modernise how attendance is recorded, with a “national data solution” used to track attendance and provide a “safety net” for vulnerable pupils at risk of disappearing from school rolls.