The most misleading tweet of the year
The Centre For Young Lives really boils my kettle.
It’s not often that I find a single tweet that’s worth blogging about. Even my Two Stars and a Wish posts for paid subscribers have not, so far included bad tweets in the “wish” section1. However, this tweet stood out, so I will make an exception and give it an accolade that I usually reserve for full-length articles.
The Centre For Young Lives is a think tank founded by former Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield.2 I would describe her as an expert at getting misleading information about young people and schools into the media. The tweet is based on the school census data collected in January, which has just been published. What makes this tweet so exceptional is that it manages to fit three different misleading statistics into its 271 characters.
As we can see from this tweet from Anne Longfield, the statistics in the tweet are intended to show “Big increases in children living with vulnerability”. This is also how most of the responses and quote tweets I saw treated it. However, none of those 3 statistics are what they seem.
Claim 1: Young Carers
According to the tweet there has been:
A 38.5% (!) increase in the number of young carers since 2022/23.
The scale of the increase should have raised suspicions here. The DfE only started asking schools to collect data on pupils with caring responsibilities at home last year. There is good reason to believe it is not accurate yet, and that many or even most young carers are not being counted. For this reason, an increase in the number of young carers being counted is a good thing. This is why Andy McGowan of the Carer’s Trust described the increase as “progress”:
The increase in young carers recorded by schools shows some progress is being made on identifying them in the classroom. But over 70% of schools still reported having no young carers at all – something we know is simply not correct. It is estimated there are actually two young carers in every class. This shows whoever forms the next Government needs to urgently prioritise improving young carer identification and support….
…We’re calling on all political parties to commit to funding initiatives that improve identification for young carers in education and to require every education setting to have a young carers lead and policy. Young carers need better and they deserve better.”
In a tweet, he expressed concern that some LAs were showing a decrease in the number of young carers.
Claim 2: Free School Meals
According to the tweet:
Free School Meal eligibility is now 24.6% (2.1 million) in 2023/24, up from 15.4% in 2018/19.
Schools are used to using FSM figures as a measure of poverty. However, there have been changes in eligibility which began in 2018. These have led to increases in FSM rates in every subsequent year. According to the NFER:
…pupils are eligible for FSM for longer. It is important to note that increases in FSM eligibility are largely among pupils who may already have been considered in need of additional support. Nevertheless, it means FSM rates will continue increasing, even if the number of children that meet the underlying criteria to qualify for FSM stays the same.
You can read more details here. I won’t claim any expertise in how these changes work, but it does mean that much of the increase in eligibility for FSM is not due to increased poverty.
Claim 3: Alternative Provision
According to the tweet:
16% increase in council funded AP placements since 2022/23. An 82% increase since 2018/19.
This is a genuinely interesting statistic. However, it is misleading in this context, because the obvious assumption anyone reading it is likely to make is that it represents pupils enrolled in Alternative Provision (AP)3. It doesn’t. There are far more LA funded AP placements (48133) than pupils enrolled in state-funded AP (15866). The vast majority of these placements (80.93%) are for one reason: “Setting named on EHC plans4”. The number of EHC plans increased by over 150000 from 2019 to 2024. The number of LA funded placements in AP has risen as the number of EHC plans has risen. This may reflect a massive increase in the number of “children living with vulnerability” but, as a statistic, it is counting provision, not need. This is a common error made when discussing SEND provision.5 We simply do not know whether the massive increase in EHCPs in recent years reflects an increase in the number of vulnerable children or not, but there is no obvious reason to assume that it does. There is even less reason to assume the number of LA funded AP placements reflects an increase in the number of vulnerable pupils.
To tweet one misleading statistic may be regarded as a misfortune, to tweet three looks like carelessness
I suspect the shoddiness of all three claims probably resulted from a desire to show life has worsened for children in recent years. A case for this can be made. However, it is not something that we can expect to be able to see from the DfE’s data on schools and pupils. It looks as if statistics have been cherry-picked to fit this conclusion. It also looks like it was done by somebody who was not fully familiar with the types of data being collected and did not care to find out.
Two Stars and a Wish posts find three things I found on the internet. Two (the stars) are good, and one (the wish) is bad. This post was originally going to be in the wish section of one of those posts, but it rapidly became too long.
I have blogged about her work quite a few times on my old blog site and also here.
According to the DfE:
…the definition of alternative provision is as follows: education arranged by local authorities for pupils who, because of exclusion, illness or other reasons, would not otherwise receive suitable education; education arranged by schools for pupils on a fixed period exclusion; and pupils being directed by schools to off-site provision to improve their behaviour.
Again, according to the DfE:
An education, health and care (EHC) plan is for children and young people aged up to 25 who need more support than is available through special educational needs support.
EHC plans identify educational, health and social needs and set out the additional support to meet those needs.
My point is that it is common for SEND provision to be counted as a measure of need, and then used as evidence that even more provision is needed. Another example of this is SEND and exclusions. Excluded pupils are more likely to be on the SEND register. This is often used as evidence that there is a need for more SEND provision for pupils at risk of exclusion. It should be seen as evidence that there is already a lot of SEND provision for pupils at risk of exclusion.