According to a report by Ofsted's chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw, professionals are not always “attuned” to the needs of missing children, while local services to support this vulnerable group are frequently lacking.
The report, based on inspections of ten authorities, found that councils rarely carried out in-depth interviews with children who ran away. This lack of attention to the experiences of children resulted in a “weak understanding” of the reasons why children run away and what could be done to prevent it.
Wilshaw said that poor recording practices – at both local and national level – mean that the true scale of how many children go missing is not known, shown by the fact that there are big discrepancies between records on missing children held by police and figures collected by councils.
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