“I came across Bella and Nasreen hiding under the stairs. I thought they were playing a dangerous game because I’d just seen the whole of the senior leadership team having lunch right round the corner. When I saw the girls I said hello; they just giggled and ran away.”

What is the truant communicating?

Young children in therapy often hide from their therapists. It is a physical metaphor and an invitation; ‘come and find me’. The child is asking the therapist to find their real selves, the thoughts, emotions and experiences which are hidden.

Students who come to the school grounds but truant lessons experience the building as a place of safety and containment. It is also a place where the adults care enough to engage in a large game of hide and seek. It is highly likely that the adults at home are too preoccupied to ‘find’ them.

Bella and Nasreen are clearly playing with fire, seeking the thrill of provoking powerful people and making them feel powerless by running away. These students could hide much more effectively than they do; they take care to ensure that they are found because this is part of the game. When truanting they will flaunt themselves outside the classroom where they are supposed to be, in a campus the size of ours, this is a deliberate provocation. They delight in being found and chased.

In Nasreen’s case, one of our most persistent truants, she will not be held by any action or any adult, no matter how powerful. She regularly walks away from the deputy head’s office, having been asked to stay. She is enjoying the power of making the adults around her helpless; it is possible that she feels helpless in many situations and is pushing her own sense of frustration on to the adults around her. At the same time, however, she is asking to be found, to be known and understood.

 There is an element of calculation to Nasreen’s behaviour that suggests that she is deliberately signalling that something is wrong, that she wants help, but she can’t bring herself to speak about it. She has recently agreed to counselling, we hope that she will come to trust that relationship enough to voice rather than signal the problem.

Bella, on the other hand, seems to experience school as a place of safety, but desires to control her relationships with the adults there. She wants to be near adults, but seeks to control the nearness, so she will often remain in the same room and talk to an adult, but will wander round the room and only make eye contact on her own terms.

Where Nasreen wants to come off her pastoral support plan and bemoans the length of the process for escaping constant monitoring, Bella is doubtful of her ability to survive independently in school. She has good intentions, she wants to please teachers, at least some of the time, but she doesn’t feel confident of her ability to control her impulses. She can’t hold long term goals in mind when short term gratification is offered and is self aware enough to recognise this as a problem. Over time Bella could change her habits and attain greater levels of impulse control. She will need appropriate support, such as modelling and guidance from a single, consistent adult.

Jigasa, another persistent truant in the past, missed lessons almost helplessly. She had very poor short term memory and low impulse control. She also, it turned out, could not hold an internal picture of the layout of the school (not an easy task, it is a particularly complex campus). She had mental pathways through the school, but these were inflexible, so to get to maths, she had to start at art, which is on the other side of the site. Invariably these peregrinations made her late, so she truanted in order not to be shouted at or punished. On the occasions when she could be accompanied to lessons, she went willingly. Better signposting on the site might have helped her.

Not turning up at all

Other truants never reach the school; they may have more pressing business elsewhere, such as a romance, clandestine or illegal activity, or feeling that they have to remain physically close to a parent in order to be held in mind.

The parents of another past truant had recently separated. Kandira’s mother had moved back to her family in Leicester and her father stayed in the area with Kandira. Kandira stopped coming to school. When the education welfare officer and, eventually, the police came to see where she was, Kandira impersonated her own aunt and told the authorities she (Kandira) had gone to stay with her mother in Leicester for a while. Her father was at work and had no idea that his daughter was not where he thought she was.

It wasn’t until the school managed to contact both parents and bring them both in for a meeting that the situation was resolved. Kandira had missed so much school that it was decided that she should repeat the year, something rarely done in the UK.

Kandira’s truancy was enabled by the lack of communication between her parents. From another point of view, Kandira was asking higher authorities to step in and restore some form of contact between her parents. Her refusal to come to school was a refusal to enable the parents to operate independently of each other in parenting her.

Teacher responses

From a teacher’s perspective, it is easy to respond with anger to truancy and tardiness. They are a rejection of us and the learning we offer. When the truant is deliberately visible outside the classroom, there is an element of mockery and provocation. We are also made to feel powerless and helpless; we cannot physically hold the student and we are being shown that our authority is too weak to enforce attendance. We are shamed.

Unfortunately, anger can only fuel truancy and tardiness. It weakens the relationship between student and teacher, making the student reluctant to approach the teacher. A powerful factor in truancy is avoiding situations where the truant feels insecure and open to shame, often when they feel like they cannot perform the academic tasks required of them. When we are angry, we transfer our sense of shame back to the student. This can be satisfying in the short term, but in the long term it does not help to achieve our aim of a productive relationship with our students as it only compounds their emotional discomfort.

There is a fine line between not being responsive enough to truancy, meaning that the truant feels there will be no consequences for their actions, and being overly emotionally responsive, meaning that the truant acquires even greater cause for truancy in that they can avoid us. If we can control our emotions in order to enact sanctions and interventions in a positive framework we are much more likely to see a change in behaviour. So, “How dare you waltz into my class 20 minutes late!” becomes “Thank you for coming. I’ll need to see you at lunch time so we can go over the things you missed.”

Clearly, for persistent truants, punishment has not changed their behaviour and if it has not worked already, it is unlikely to suddenly become effective without other forms of intervention.

As with so many issues, there is not a single reason or answer for truancy. What we can say is that punishment alone will not solve the problem as it does not address the underlying emotional needs expressed through deliberate absence and may result in increased absence. Discussion with the truant, careful logging of the incidents and a thoughtful analysis of the problem will have much more success in encouraging these students back into the classroom.