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Schools, police, and care agencies are all required to collect data on runaways, but the information is often not pulled together effectively or properly exchanged between the services.

Schools are on the frontline of safeguarding these vulnerable children. Teachers are in a prime position to identify children who are upset, under stress or frequently missing school. These are the children who are most likely to run away from home.

For Stansfield, the "key issue" is that schools know who to call, and that they call them as soon it becomes clear that someone has run away, even if it has been for just a few hours, as this behaviour can "quickly spiral"

Teachers — many of them — will continue to resent efforts to use standardized tests to measure their ability to teach.

Tucker, 72, a former senior education official in Washington, is the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which he founded in 1988. Since then he has focused much of his research on comparing public education in the United States with that of places that have far better results than we do — places like Finland, Japan, Shanghai and Ontario, Canada. His essential conclusion is that the best education systems share common traits — almost none of which are embodied in either the current American system or in the reform ideas that have gained sway over the last decade or so.

His starting point is not the public schools themselves but the universities that educate teachers. Teacher education in America is vastly inferior to many other countries; we neither emphasize pedagogy — i.e., how to teach — nor demand mastery of the subject matter. Both are a given in the top-performing countries. (Indeed, it is striking how many nonprofit education programs in the U.S. are aimed at helping working teachers do a better job — because they’ve never learned the right techniques.)

Students can access websites that do not contain or that filter mature content. They can use their real names, pictures, and work (as long it doesn’t have a grade/score from a school) with the notification and/or permission of the student and their parent or guardian

 Anyone can begin making a difference and contributing real work at any age.

what puts kids at risk are things like: having a lot of conflict with your parents being depressed and socially isolated being hyper communicating with a lot of people who you don't know being willing to talk about sex with people that you don't know having a pattern of multiple risky activities going to sex sites and chat rooms, meeting lots of people there, and behaving like an Internet daredevil.

When we shift our thinking from demanding the government provides one-size-fits-some solutions and move it to let's empower families to take ownership of securing tools for their learning, change can happen.  

“A generation of children has grown up with continuous connectivity to the internet. A few years ago, nobody had a piece of plastic to which they could ask questions and have it answer back. The Greeks spoke of the oracle of Delphi. We’ve created it. People don’t talk to a machine. They talk to a huge collective of people, a kind of hive. Our generation [Mitra is 64] doesn’t see that. We just see a lot of interlinked web pages

“Within five years, you will not be able to tell if somebody is consulting the internet or not. The internet will be inside our heads anywhere and at any time. What then will be the value of knowing things? We shall have acquired a new sense. Knowing will have become collective.”

if you imagine me and my phone as a single entity, yes. Very soon, asking somebody to read without their phone will be like telling them to read without their glasses.”