ABSTRACT
It sometimes appears that exclusion from school, not allowing the habitual truant to come back, is a kind of conspiracy or agreement, made the more urgent because of the way the government proposes to use truancy figures as a means of assessing schools. Exclusion can appear to justify schools’ failure to keep their pupils. No-one can doubt the personal relief felt by the teachers facing large classes and difficult pupils when a particular source of disruption is absent. The responsibility is the pupils’ but the blame is attached to the school. It is worth bearing in mind through this chapter, which reports on empirical research, that the more we explored the psychological aspects of truancy and the personal feelings and traumas that lead to it, such as being part of
a conspiracy of bullying which involves not only the majority of pupils but also teachers (Cullingford and Morrison, 1995), the more difficult it is to define its parameters. Besides, if truancy is voluntary physical exclusion from school, more politely termed absenteeism, how do we describe the way that children mentally turn themselves off from lessons and remain uninvolved, if physically there; that is, the ‘invisible children’? (Pye, 1991).
