Daily roundup: Missing children, child protection, and youth unemployment

Missing children investigations will be focused on the most at-risk children in future, the Association of Chief Police Officers has said. The Guardian reports that as a result of cases such as the Rochdale child sexual exploitation case, where police and social workers did not act on warnings that young girls were at risk, a new system will be introduced. The definition of missing people will be changed to "absent" or "missing" after a risk assessment is carried out by police call handlers. Police will not be sent to cases where young people or adults are defined as being "absent". The NSPCC has raised concerns that the new definition could place vulnerable children at risk of being groomed and sexually exploited.

A damning Ofsted report has labelled Northamptonshire’s child protection services inadequate. The Northampton Chronicle reports that inspectors found that children and young people in the county were “not effectively protected from harm”. “There are systematic weaknesses and inconsistent and ineffective practices that contribute to children and young people at risk of harm not consistently being recognised or helped,” the report states.

The number of young people without a job rose to 993,000 between November and January. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the total number of unemployed 16- to 24-year-olds rose 48,000 from the previous three-month period. The youth unemployment rate now stands at 21.2 per cent. Lottie Dexter, director of youth unemployment campaign Million Jobs, said: “This is not a blip but part of a worrying trend. We cannot continue like this and there can be no more shallow excuses. If we ignore our young unemployed then we leave our economy and society to wither on the vine. The Chancellor must take big, bold action today to guarantee Britain’s future success. He must empower employers to hire more young people.”

A record number of parents were fined for allowing their children to skip school last year. The Telegraph reports that 41,200 parents were handed £50 fines for the offence and 6,361 were taken to court for failing to pay their fines on time. The rise coincides with a change to the definition of “persistent absentees” by the coalition government in 2011, which reduced the threshold for being deemed a persistent absentee from missing 20 per cent of lesson time to 15 per cent of lesson time.