ortion • Children and young people subjected to online exploitation, with perpetrators finding ways to target children who might be particularly vulnerable to perpetrator strategies • Referrals to Prevent relating to online activity by children and young people • Children and young people accessing violent pornography and radicalisation videos, as well as using Snapchat to arrange sexual encounters, or using Telegram because, in contrast to Snapchat, it is not possible to take screen shots of images. 2.9 School absence and exclusion The breaching of the social contract with schools is widely reported and we see families […] finding it difficult to maintain attendance and the structure required for good school attendance. (Survey, County, South West Region) 24 Since the pandemic, rates of school exclusion and suspension have risen sharply to record highs, and the safeguarding pressures generated are significant. The relationship between children being out of school and at risk of extra-familial harms are well understood (Maxwell et al., 2019). In DCS interviews, post-pandemic school absence was often linked with children feeling isolated and unwilling to leave the family home. The interviews reflected the gathered data in terms of a large increase in children open to children’s social care who are persistently absent from school and costly increases in the use of alternative provision (AP) placements. A lower level of engagement with education was described as a ‘real ticking time bomb’, particularly in the secondary sector where respondents noted that schools were seeing more disruptive behaviour in 11-year-olds entering secondary education, but this was also evident in primary schools. Concerning levels of dysregulation and risk-taking were reported in children as youn