Truancy: Figures show slight rise

Ministers blame parents for truancy rise

Ministers blame parents for truancy rise

The government has blamed parents taking their children away for cheap holidays during term-time for rising truancy rates.

Figures show nearly four million school days were lost to truancy in the spring term 2007, with the overall truancy rate – recorded as a percentage of missed lessons – up on the previous year.

Despite the government investing £1 billion in tackling truancy since 1997, 47,000 secondary school and 19,000 primary school pupils are still missing classes every day.

While opposition politicians held this up as a failure of discipline, ministers claimed many days are missed due to parents taking their children out of school for foreign holidays, which are cheaper during term time.

Schools are allowed to grant up to ten days authorised holiday, but are told this should not be an automatic right for parents.

Children’s minister Kevin Brennan called on travel companies to price holidays more competitively during the normal peak periods.

He said: “Travel companies have a role to play in keeping prices competitive during school holidays.

“While I sympathise with the financial pressure on parents, no cut-price deal is worth harming a child’s education, and we need parents to work with schools to ensure their children are in school every day.”

The Liberal Democrats argued instead that the figures “hide the reality of thousands of children who have fallen out of the education system and who are hanging around on our streets instead of developing the skills they will need.”

Schools spokesman David Laws said: “The solution must lie in the schools themselves, not in more Whitehall meddling. We need not only tougher school discipline but a curriculum which is relevant for students of differing interests and abilities.”

His comments were echoed by the Conservatives, who called for a return to streaming to stretch the brightest children and prevent them from skipping school through boredom.

Shadow schools secretary Nick Gibb warned the figures were “yet another sign” of the need to improve discipline.

He said: “We need a genuine focus on improving behaviour in our schools – zero tolerance of disruption. We need to give heads the power to exclude pupils without their decisions being second guessed by local authorities.”

The government was further embarrassed when it emerged truancy rates are worse in city academies, which are usually located in deprived inner-city areas.

While truancy rates in all secondary schools rose from 1.49 per cent to 1.61 per cent over the year, academies saw rates rise from 2.62 per cent 3.04 per cent.

Mr Laws said: “Ministers will be particularly disappointed at the rise in truancy figures in their flagship academy programme.”

Mr Brennan said the figures were distorted by the opening of new academies, with 46 such schools this year compared to 27 the year before. He said the older academies had turned truancy around.