June 14, 2005
Tuesday
Hidden truancy
The amount of truancy from Britain's state schools is even higher than previously reported. It now emerges that:
Children who miss school during the rest of the summer term will not be counted in the official annual absence statistics for the year in England.Schools are required to report pupils' attendance from September up to the end of May only.
Attention has been brought to this by the Liberal Democrats. The BBC Online story is here.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education
Comments (1)
TrackBack (7)
Comments
Warning: file(http://63.247.138.2/~bartholo/randomquotes.dump) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No route to host in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2005/06/hidden_truancy.php on line 287
Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2005/06/hidden_truancy.php on line 287
Been happening for yonks.
First lot of league tables, we were in the Sun for the worst truancy records - despite being a largely residential school.
The reason was that 10 of our pupils (about 10% of the totals) had one or more unauthorised absence. In DfES land, this meant a 10 percent truancy rate. (The real figure was more like 0.1%).
So we, and everyone else, simply redefined the "unauthorised absence" so it meant more like "we had no idea where they were" rather than "they didn't come to school today".
I do not understand why anyone believes any government statistic. It is all codswallop.
Posted by: Paul at June 16, 2005 07:48 AM