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Think of a child you know right now. Their attendance is above 90 per cent. Their behaviour is unremarkable. They hand in just enough work to stay beneath the threshold for concern. On every system, every checklist, every dashboard: fine.

But many of these pupils are not fine.

I have spent 20 years in UK schools; teaching, leading, safeguarding. I have sat in more crisis meetings than I care to count. And in every single one of them, there has been a moment when someone has said, usually quietly and usually early, “We could see this coming.”

We always can. We almost never act in time.

Acting early to stop absence

Across the autumn and spring terms of 2024-25, 17.63 per cent of pupils in England were persistently absent. The pre-pandemic rate was 10.53 per cent. The noise around attendance, belonging and disengagement has never been louder.

But almost all of it describes children who are already visible, who have already crossed a threshold. The children I am writing about have not crossed any threshold yet. They are still attending. Still on roll. And they are already leaving.

There is a period - weeks or sometimes months - between the first signs that a young person is disengaging and the formal crisis that finally triggers a response. It is the window in which support is cheapest, kindest and most likely to work. I call it pre-absence drift. And it is the window we consistently fail to act in.

Spotting the signs

The signs are recognisable to anyone who has worked in pastoral care for long enough.

The student who used to contribute in class and now says nothing. Monday absences appearing without pattern. A child who has shifted their friendship group and increasingly sits alone, and nobody has quite asked why. A Year 10 who has stopped talking about the future. The student who masks so well that three separate staff members would all say they seem fine.

None of these triggers a formal process. All of them, read together, are a child telling us something.

The data to give us that signal is already sitting in every school in England, in registers, pastoral notes, behaviour logs and form tutor records. We are not short of information. We are short of a system that connects it early enough for someone to act.

Invisible learners

I call these young people “invisible learners”. Not because they are hard to find, but because the system was built to see everything except them.

The phrase has been used in education literature for years, mostly to describe pupils with undiagnosed needs or quiet online learners. I use it for something different: the children whose disengagement is already visible in school data but it is not being read in time.

I grew up in Ghana in a community where the expected trajectory for most children around me was not education. The reason I ended up in a different story is simple: somebody noticed me before I stopped believing another story was possible.

One adult, in one building, paying attention at the right moment. I think about that every time I sit in a meeting about a young person who we all knew was struggling months before we finally said so.

Reacting to the data

Recent work on school belonging has helped to evidence what experienced pastoral leaders have long observed.

A child’s sense of belonging is closely tied to long-term engagement, and changes in belonging can appear well before the absence figures, behaviour incidents and attainment dips that current systems are built to catch.

The government’s own guidance on preventing young people from becoming Neet (not in education, employment or training) states that early intervention from Year 7 is critical and that schools already hold the data to make it happen.

The gap is not the data. The gap is the will to act on it before a child runs out of time.

I am not asking for a new programme. I am not asking for more funding. I am asking for something simpler and considerably harder: a shared agreement that children should not have to reach crisis point before we believe them.

That means shared language so that what a form tutor notices in September reaches a pastoral lead in October, not February.

It means treating the quiet withdrawal of a young person with the same urgency that we give to disruption. It means the children we lose most often are the ones we had the most time to help.

Talking about the issue

What we need to do, though, as a sector, is talk about this more so we collectively know what to look for and how to act, and so that we have a language to talk about the issue.

That’s why if you recognise invisible learners in your school, I would like to hear from you about what you have seen of this issue: what did you notice? When did you notice it? And what stopped you from acting sooner? Those stories matter.

They are the evidence base that this conversation needs. Connect with me or email me.

I am gathering these accounts to inform a piece of practitioner-led work on early disengagement, and to build a shared language that the sector can use to act sooner.

The more practitioners who name this experience together, the harder it becomes for any system to keep missing it.

Because the children we are losing are the ones who never gave us a formal reason to worry. By the time they do, we have already missed the moment that mattered.

Gloria Dalafu is founder and chief executive of School2U Virtual Academy CIC. She spent 20 years in schools in inner London and Essex, as a form tutor, head of year with safeguarding and behaviour responsibility, and lead practitioner in mathematics