social care are permanently excluded at eight times the national rate and severely absent from school at over five times • Students entitled to free school meals are nearly five times more likely to be permanently excluded and four times more likely to be suspended than their peers • The poorest areas of England have the highest rates of lost learning through unauthorised absences and suspensions • Children from some ethnic minority backgrounds are disproportionately placed in AP. These include children from Black Caribbean (two and a half times more likely than average), Romani (Gypsy), Roma and Irish Traveller (four times more likely), and children with mixed Black Caribbean and white heritage (two and a half times more likely) • Children with mental health needs are three times as likely to have to move schools than their peers; and those with mental health needs so severe that it is classified as a special educational need are 17 times more likely than average to be educated in AP schools serving excluded pupils • Children with school-identified special educational needs are five times more likely to be permanently excluded. 2.10 Elective home education Regional Improvement and Innovation Alliance (RIIA) benchmarking data has reported on children who are electively home educated since April 2022. Figure 5 shows rates per 10,000 children continuing to rise. In 2022, the Department for Education (DfE) began publishing termly data on children who are missing from education and reported 111,700 children being educated at home in autumn 2024, and 153,300 children at any point across the 2023-24 academic year (DfE, 2024b). 26 Figure 5: Children who are electively home educated at the end of the period Source: RIIA quarterly dataset. Rate per 10,000 of the 5–16 population.