MORE than 400 children have disappeared without trace from Bradford schools in the past two years, new figures show.

A total of 417 children have vanished from school registers since summer 2013 and the authorities have exhausted all efforts to trace them and their families.

Enquiries are continuing into a further 217 children currently missing from school rolls, while a total of 1,327 children who disappeared with their families in the past two years were eventually traced.

Conservative group leader Councillor Simon Cooke described the figures as "quite frightening".

Bradford Council bosses said many of the children going missing were from Slovakian Roma families, and as a result the Council was now having to work with authorities in Slovakia to try to hunt down families who had pulled pupils out of school unexpectedly.

Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, the executive member for education, said: "Every child is important to us here in Bradford and we spend considerable resources looking for them if they go missing from school.

"A case file is kept on every child and we liaise with agencies not just in this country but overseas to track children down.

"At the moment the majority of children missing are from Slovakian Roma families, many of whom choose to go back to Slovakia and we've therefore built strong links with agencies in that country to trace families."

Cllr Hinchcliffe said Bradford had a history of people moving in and out of the district on a regular basis.

She said: "As a local authority we've therefore had to have good systems in place to trace children who go missing from school.

"The Ofsted report on Bradford 18 months ago stated that the procedures we have in place for children missing education are good with a wide range of work being done to ensure that the welfare and whereabouts of children are known."

But Cllr Cooke said: "It is a serious issue and I do think the response from Cllr Hinchcliffe, like a lot of responses around education, is a little complacent.

"I do think that we need that we need to get a little more humanity in the way we are discussing this, rather than just calling them numbers and talking about bureaucratic actions.

"I think we actually need to think of these as children and actually be a little bit more active in working with schools to find out why this is happening."

He said he had written to the director of children's services, Michael Jameson, asking what was being done about the problem.

The Telegraph and Argus obtained the figures after Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw warned of "potentially high numbers of pupils" disappearing from school registers elsewhere in the UK.

Sir Michael last week wrote an open letter to the Department for Education, after Ofsted inspected schools in Birmingham and Tower Hamlets as a follow-up to the Trojan Horse inquiries.

Sir Michael said he believed the problem of children going missing from school registers had wider implications for the rest of the country, and called for systems to be tightened up to take account of the "risks that some young people face, such as female genital mutilation, forced marriage, child sexual exploitation and falling prey to radicalisation".

The Department for Education said it would take immediate steps to tighten procedures across the country for when a child is taken off a school roll.

Cllr Hinchcliffe said she welcomed this.

She said: "I do think statutory guidance from Government to local authorities on the matter is probably overdue. The last time any was issued was in 2009 - none was issued in the last parliament.

"However here in Bradford we've not been waiting for new guidance. Instead as it's such an important area of work, we are an active member of a regional network with our neighbouring local authorities to share best practice and we have been part of that network since its inception."

In Bradford, when a child goes missing from school, the school itself is expected to make efforts to find them, such as visiting their last known address, calling all known phone numbers and contacting extended family members.

If that doesn't work, it refers the matter to the Education Social Work Service at Bradford Council, which works with the police and others to try to track down the child.

If the child still cannot be found, the Government's Department for Education is notified.

Of the 1,961 children reported missing from school registers in the past two years, the figures show 27 per cent were of a Roma background, 14 per cent were Asian and eight per cent were white British.

Last month, Bradford sisters Khadija Dawood, 30, Sugra Dawood, 34, and Zohra Dawood, 33, and their nine children, aged between three and 15, did not return to Bradford following a family trip to Saudi Arabia and are feared to have travelled to ISIS-controlled Syria.