School attendance and truancy: a socio-historical account

This paper considers ways in which truancy, as a form of social exclusion, has its origins in the history and politics of compulsory education. Despite widespread concern expressed about declining standards, rising indiscipline, incompetent teachers, outmoded curriculum and mounting truancy in the U.K., it is argued here that such issues are not new. Thus, for the purposes of the paper contemporary research, policy and media hype, premised on ‘discovery’ of declining standards of behaviour and school attendance, is questioned precisely because the level of analysis from which they begin is inadequate. Hence, two interrelated aspects of this phenomenon are considered. The first concerns a socio-historical account of compulsory education as it is mediated by the relations between family, law and economy. Here, questions regarding whose interests state education serves, and the juxtaposing of education vs schooling are considered. The second concerns the relatively recent status of mass schooling and shifting definitions as changing policy, historical, political, economic and legal conditions alter its relationship with parents, pupils and the world of work. In this respect the paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to an inter-agency phenomenon. What the paper seeks to demonstrate is the way truancy touches on a sensitive and deeply embedded social nerve, which has its root in the very history and ethos of compulsory state education and its worth.