Journal Article (Truants on Truanccy)

Truants on Truancy – a badness or a valuable indicator of unmet special educational needs?


Truancy is any intentional unexcused or unauthorized absence from compulsory schooling. The term basically describes the absences of a student by there own free will. Usually the absence does not refer to legitimate excused absences such as dental or medical conditions. In the article Neil Southwell states that he was himself, a persistent truant from school. He returned back to school through an access course and he now lectures in education studies at the University of Northampton. In the article Southwell viewed the literature on truancy and revealed a complex and contradictory picture. He argued that truancy was able to be seen as a key indicator to unmet educational needs and that the issue of truancy would not be addressed effectively until policy makers, practitioners and researchers learned to listen to the voices of truants themselves.
The article states that the reason why truancy came about was because the Government prevented truancy from being seen in any other way. The government at the time automatically said that truancy is a crime and not just a problem. The resulting certainty that the badness of truancy was at best self-contained and worse a major cause of crime, ensured that physical school attendance alone was politically acceptable and was all that required from the Government (p.92a). Southwell tried to show the readers of his article that truancy was part of a problem that needed to be addressed, but a major difficulty in addressing it was always its elusiveness. The Government and education policies had, in their perception and portrayal of truancy as badness, failed to defeat it, yet they did not consider their fundamental mistake was their misidentification of truancy as badness (p.92b) The Government failed to realize what the real issues were and instead they focused on the unimportant. Furthermore, the Government’s insistence on linking truancy to crime, and its rhetoric of being tough on the causes to crime, exposed that its motive was one of tackling crime rather than of ensuring educational conclusion (p.92b). In contemplation they physically held children in schools because they thought it would massively reduce crime, when a link between truancy and crime has been contested for decades and has been shown time and time again to be the result of flawed participant selection methods (Carlen, Gleeson & Wardhaugh, 1992; Gimshaw & Pratt; 1984; Tyerman, 1968; Whitney, 1994).
Other Researchers had their own definition of truancy. They contributed to the perception of truancy as badness, yet few were actually in agreement as to what precisely was bad about truancy. Stoll & O’Keeffe (1989) defined truancy as being absent from school (altogether or from a particular lesson or lessons) with or without a parent’s or guardian’s knowledge or consent. Reid (1993) saw truancy as illegal absence without parental consent on knowledge. As for Southwell, he argued that truancy was a form of ‘education Otherwise’ according to the terms of the 1944 Education Act. He also argued that the needs of truants, and of their families, would continue to be unmet by the Government. Truancy remained exclusory imposed even though it was self-actuated. Specialists who took the time to adopt that perspective to further the aims of inclusion were able to achieve a truant’s perspective. Researchers did this when their approach was informed by an adopted understanding of truancy as a self-actuated exclusion imposed by defective schools that failed to meet the special educational needs of all truants, and of their parents (p95). They achieved a truant’s perspective when they found a truant who openly and fully included them.
According to the Piagetian Ideas (McNair, 2010) Children are able to create and improve their patterns of thinking and behaving (schemes) through direct encounters with their environments and their memories of those encounters. Children experience the (external, physical) environment through their senses and Ideas. If the Government were to just understand the children and just listen to their perspectives and reasons as to why take part in truancy and not just make assumptions they would probably find a solution to it all. If truancy continues to be regarded as a badness of itself, there remains a danger that the underlying of educational needs will continue to go unmet because policies designed to stamp out truancy oppressively will also, by extinguishing the warning signal it provides, prevent those special educational needs from being recognized.