It is disturbing that dozens of children fail to return to Bradford schools after the summer holidays and are still unaccounted for more than four months later.

There might, of course, be relatively innocent explanations for some of these, such as families moving away from the area and perhaps leaving the country and failing to notify the relevant school authorities. This is unhelpful, but not necessarily malicious.

However, that cannot account for all of those children who remain untraced after simply leaving school for the summer break and never returning. Out of almost a hundred children who didn’t go back to school following the break this year, more than half remain unaccounted for.

There can be far darker reasons why young people are seemingly spirited away, including the fears that they are being taken overseas and forced into marriages, which some campaigners worry might have happened to some of the 54 children in this case.

It is all the more disturbing that it is so unclear where these children are. We are told that there are “robust procedures” for tracing children and their families in these situations, but evidently more than 50 families have managed to avoid being traced.

Of those children who were traced after failing to return to school, some had simply enrolled at other schools right here in the district and others had moved outside of Bradford.

Those were the easy ones to find. What is important is that the movements of every child are known to the authorities to prevent any young person being forced into a situation that is either unpleasant, unwanted or even dangerous to them. Every effort needs to be made to ensure that every child who falls off the radar is traced as quickly as possible.