Youth workers will visit the homes of students who are absent from school to prevent them from being “victimized” by gangs, a police commissioner said.
Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner, Conservative Festus Akinbusoye, will pilot the scheme at six secondary schools in the county.
Mr Akinbusoye said 90% of juvenile offenders were “persistently absent from school”.
To prevent this, an “early intervention approach” is “crucial,” he said.
The absent students would receive home visits within hours of their no-show at school, Mr Akinbusoye said.
He said 65% of young people involved in a homicide had school absenteeism as “one of the common themes in their backstory” and 83% of young knife offenders were persistently absent from school.
“It’s a worrying trend,” he added.
Mr Akinbusoye said the current approach to absentee students “is not working”.
He said about 1.8 million children missed at least 10% of their schooling in the 2021-22 fall semester, and about 122,000 missed half of school.
It was also estimated that 135,000 children had not returned to school since the start of the school year.
“The fact that in Britain today a child can be absent from school for any period of time without anyone seeing the child or visiting their home, despite making phone calls or texting a responsible adult, is no longer tenable,” he said called.
Mr Akinbusoye said when a student is absent from school, a home visit is made by staff from the Youth Intervention Service of the Interior Ministry-funded Unit for Reducing Violence and Exploitation.
“The aim of the visits is to improve the process of the young person’s return to education or training, while assessing their well-being and home situation,” he said.
“Too many of our young people are victims or perpetrators of murders and other violent crimes because they fall prey to the exploitative County Lines ‘elders’ when they are uneducated.”
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