A senior council officer has warned there will be a “tsunami of issues” across the country if the level of children absent from school is not addressed.

Southampton City Council’s executive director for children and learning Robert Henderson said there were “ongoing challenges” around the number of youngsters not in the classroom.

Mr Henderson said the city’s primary school absences were reducing significantly, but at the secondary schools, the figures were stuck at a level that would not even have been considered before the pandemic.

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The officer gave this assessment at a recent meeting of the council’s children and families scrutiny panel during a discussion on the outcome of the local area special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) inspection.

Mr Henderson said there was a problem around absence and children missing out on school.

He said: “I’m hoping the new government will have a strategic approach to that because it is going to be a tsunami of issues if these children don’t attend school.

“But also alongside that there are parents taking their children out of school because they don’t think their needs are being met.”

Department for Education statistics show that there were 880 children missing education (CME) in Southampton last autumn, which was 2.6 per cent of the population.

This was up from 530 children (1.6 per cent) in the 2022/23 summer term. Data from before the pandemic is not available.

The department says CME are children of compulsory school age who are not registered pupils at a school and are not receiving suitable education in a non-school setting.

Across England, the number of CME has been increasing. It was recorded at 24,700 in the 2022/23 autumn term and 12 months later it was 33,000.

The overall absence rate across Southampton’s state-funded primary, secondary and special schools for the most recent autumn term was 7.3 per cent.

This was down from 8.1 per cent the previous year but still up on the pre-pandemic figure of 4.3 per cent in 2019/20.

Nationally, the overall absence rate for autumn 2023/24 was recorded as 6.7 per cent.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: ““We are committed to improving attendance including by providing access to specialist mental health professionals in every secondary school, introducing free breakfast clubs in every primary and ensuring earlier intervention in mainstream schools for pupils with special needs."