Why unexplained school absence is one of the earliest external indicators of county lines involvement — and why CME intelligence and county lines intelligence sit in separate silos that rarely talk to each other. What police can lawfully do, when to consider the NRM, how to share information with LA CME teams, and what the school's timeline looks like from the inside.
CME, persistent absence, and Missing from Home are three distinct categories that frequently overlap in the cases police encounter. Understanding the difference matters because the responsible agency, the legal powers, and the appropriate response vary significantly:
| Term | Definition | Responsible lead |
|---|---|---|
| Children Missing from Education (CME) | A child of compulsory school age who is not registered at a school and is not receiving a suitable education otherwise (e.g. EHE, hospital school). Includes children who have been removed from a school roll without a new placement confirmed. | Local authority (CME team / Education Welfare) |
| Persistent Absence (PA) | A pupil who is missing 10% or more of school sessions (any reason). The pupil is still registered at a school. Persistent absence is a school attendance matter — but persistent unauthorised absence in a vulnerable pupil is a safeguarding trigger. | School (attendance officer / DSL) |
| Missing from Home / Care (MFH) | A child whose whereabouts are unknown and who may be at risk. Can co-exist with CME or PA — a child who is both missing from home and from education requires both police MFH protocols and LA CME engagement. | Police |
| Elective Home Education (EHE) | A parent exercises their legal right under s.7 Education Act 1996 to educate their child at home. The child is not CME if they are receiving suitable education. EHE is lawful — but it can be used to remove a vulnerable child from professional oversight. | Local authority (monitoring function, non-statutory) |
A child is of compulsory school age from the term following their fifth birthday until the last Friday in June of the school year in which they turn sixteen. Police should be aware of this boundary: a 16-year-old who leaves education in Year 11 is not CME after the last Friday in June — they are legally entitled to leave. A 15-year-old who drops off the roll is CME regardless of how long they have been absent.
The local authority has the s.436A duty to identify CME children in their area. In practice, this relies on notifications from:
The CME team in most local authorities is small — often part of the Education Welfare or School Attendance service. They hold a register of known CME children, but it is consistently under-representative of the true population because the notification mechanisms are imperfect.
Elective home education is a lawful parental choice, and the majority of EHE families are not a safeguarding concern. However, EHE can be used as a mechanism to remove a vulnerable child from the protective scrutiny of school. Indicators that an EHE registration may warrant closer attention include:
School absence — specifically the pattern of it — is one of the most reliable early external indicators of county lines involvement. It is earlier than most police intelligence triggers, earlier than most family escalation points, and visible to a professional who sees the child every day. The problem is that the professional who sees it (the school) and the professional who can act on it (police, MASH) are often not talking about the same child.
County lines intelligence typically sits within serious organised crime teams, regional organised crime units (ROCUs), or dedicated county lines units. CME intelligence sits within the LA's education welfare service. These two data sets are rarely cross-referenced in real time:
Where county lines and CME intelligence are being effectively joined up, the practice includes:
Police do not hold the primary CME duty — that sits with the local authority under s.436A Education Act 1996. But police have significant roles and legal tools when a CME child comes to their attention, and the absence of a primary duty does not mean an absence of responsibility.
CME status alone does not automatically meet the s.47 threshold — but CME combined with other vulnerability indicators (county lines markers, domestic abuse history, MFH episodes, age) may well do so. When police encounter a CME child with exploitation indicators, the appropriate step is a MASH referral that explicitly references the CME status and asks MASH to assess whether s.47 enquiries are appropriate.
If a CME child is encountered and shows indicators of modern slavery or criminal exploitation, police are a competent authority for the purposes of the National Referral Mechanism (NRM). The NRM trigger for a child is lower than for an adult — there is no "consent" requirement for a child referral. Indicators that make an NRM referral appropriate alongside a MASH referral include:
An NRM referral for a child does not require confirmation of exploitation — it requires reasonable grounds to believe the child may be a victim of modern slavery. The CME context is often precisely the missing piece that makes those reasonable grounds credible.
Every child who has been reported missing should receive a Return to Home Interview when they come back. This is a statutory requirement under the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review Regulations 2010 (for looked-after children) and recommended best practice for all children under statutory guidance. A child who has been CME for an extended period and then reappears — at home, at school, or after a police encounter — should be treated with the same thoroughness as any missing child return:
Effective CME safeguarding depends on police and LA CME teams sharing information about the same children in real time. In many areas, this does not happen routinely — and children fall through the gap as a result. This article covers the legal basis for sharing, what to share, and how to make the information flow work practically.
The LA CME team typically sits within the Education Welfare or School Attendance service, not within the children's social care directorate. This matters because officers who know how to contact MASH or the children's social care duty team may not know how to contact the CME team — and vice versa. Find your local CME team contact and add it to your safeguarding contacts list alongside MASH. In most areas you can find it via the LA's children's services directory.
When a child of compulsory school age comes to police attention and there are welfare or exploitation concerns, consider sharing:
The CME team will check whether the child is on the CME register, whether there is an active EWO case, and whether the child has a confirmed school place. This information, shared back to police, completes the picture.
A child can be deregistered from school by a parent at any time, without the LA's consent, simply by notifying the school. If a child is deregistered while they are a subject of police intelligence, or while a MASH referral is pending, the police should notify both MASH and the CME team of this context. The LA has a duty under Working Together 2026 to conduct a welfare assessment before agreeing that EHE is appropriate where there is a pre-existing safeguarding concern — but they can only do this if they know the safeguarding concern exists.
Understanding how the school responds when a child stops attending — and how long it takes — is essential context for police. The school's CME timeline is slower than it might appear from the outside, and by the time a child reaches CME status on the LA's register, the situation is often well advanced.
At every stage of this process, the DSL is making a parallel assessment of whether the absence suggests a safeguarding risk beyond non-attendance. The factors that escalate a standard attendance concern to a MASH referral include:
The DfE's annual school census takes place in October. It captures every pupil on roll at that point. A child who dropped off the roll in November and has not been placed at a new school by the following October will not appear in any LA CME count between those two dates — unless a notification was made. In practice, a significant number of CME children are never counted in official statistics because the notification and census capture mechanisms both fail.
When police encounter a child in a county lines context and wish to share information with their school, the most useful thing to do is:
This two-way conversation — police sharing what they know about the child's criminal exploitation context, the DSL sharing what they have seen in the child's attendance and behaviour — is the mechanism by which county lines cases and CME cases stop being parallel silos and start being a coherent vulnerability picture.