From Free Life, Issue 17, January 1993
ISSN: 0260 5112

If evidence were still needed to show that something is wrong in the upper reaches of state-provided secondary education this well-documented book goes a long way to provide it. It brings into the open a state of affairs which educational authorities have tended over recent years to play down or deny. The authors' enquiries indicate that many children who are supposed to be at school receiving education at the public expense are often not where they should be at all. Truancy is nowadays widespread and persistent, a conclusion which emerges from a Pilot Study carried out in a North London Comprehensive School and a wider survey covering nine secondary schools, in London, the Home Counties, and in the north of England.

Truancy is not new and may still be a minority problem overall, but its extent revealed in this book will be disconcerting to those who remember past year. This reviewer recalls an occasion at an Elementary School in the late 1920s when a boy so far weakened the social fabric as to absent hlmself from school for an afternoon without permission. The whole school was mustered to hear of this enormity and to witness its condign retribution and the solemnity of this almost unprecedented occasion lingers yet. Sixty years on these findings show that in some schools truancy is now a social diversion amongst friends, with refined strategies like post-registration absenteeism invented to defeat authority.

There are causes external and internal to education at work here. Stoll and O'Keeffe concentrate mainly on internal factors and see truancy as a reaction against parts of the curriculum which many pupils find boring or irrelevant or both. Pupils who play truant do so for various reasons but basically because they don't like lessons very much and some lessons not at all. The detailed findings of this book reveal that whilst most pupils say that they do not dislike school as such, many nonetheless dislike, inter alia, French, English, Mathematics and Games, and dislike them sufficiently to dodge them when they can. Secondary schools being as large as they generally are, it is usually easy for the disaffected to bunk off without much fear of detection or of punishment if detected. Leviathan no longer wields the educational version of the sword to keep anyone in awe.

Stoll and O'Keeffe very sensibly call for a tightening-up of school organisation and pupil-surveillance, together with a re-thinking of parts of the traditional curriculum, particularly as it affects those pupils whose bent is non-academic. They advocate a diminished emphasis on games and compulsory languages and an increase in consumer choice subjects, with tional courses of a practical, domestic and recrecreationak kind which reflect the post-school expectations of many pupils. This is no doubt the best bet for reducing if not eliminating truancy and disturbing behaviour in school at least so far as internal causes are concerned. For the truth is that for many pupils the traditional secondary school curriculum produces little but apathy, boredom and sometimes worse. This point is made more or less explicitly on page 86 where the authors say:

There are large numbers of children who do not want and cannot manage the liberal curriculum.

This has been evident for a long time but it has not generally been fashionable to say so.

Emphasis on the curricular aspects of truancy is much to the point and a revised regime to meet the needs of those whose life-styles will not reflect a concern with education understood as the traditional culture is a most desirable reform. There is, however, another, external dimension to the problem. The general weakening of authority which has followed the Second World War, the authority of parents and teachers in particular, and the growth of a sophisticated commercialised youth culture has produced amongst many adolescents an impatience with what they see as the irksome restraints of school and made school attendance seem for them less of an obligation than an exercisable option. Whilst curricular reform is a priority so too is the need to consider what is to be done with those pupils now kept compulsorily at school but for whom any sort of school curriculum is likely to seem pointless. This problem calls for a detailed study to supplement the present book.

Officially Present is an admirable piece of research and deserves widespread attention. It raises issues of immediate concern not on parents and those professionally involved in education but also to the general public which has to pay dearly to maintain a system which plainly fails to meet the needs of a significant number of those it is meant to benefit.

T.W. Moore