ABSTRACT
Most British research has seen the school system as playing an essentially passive role in the development of truancy: after all, schooling is something that all pupils share, but not all pupils play truant. The research has tended to focus instead on the supposed pathology of the families and family backgrounds of persistent truants, and especially of those who have been identified and treated as such by the various legal, social, medical and educational agencies that process pupils regarded as problem children. Using the 1977 survey data, we argue in this chapter that the phenomenon of truancy cannot be explained solely in terms of the pathology of individuals and families, quite simply because it has been so widespread. We then show that the patterning of this phenomenon has, nevertheless, corresponded to that which is predicted by explanations couched in terms of individual and family pathology. Next we show that this patterning could, in its turn, largely be explained statistically in terms of the different effects of the school system on different pupils. In particular the data reveal that the pupils who truanted most frequently tended to be those pupils who were excluded from work for certification; the pupils who were rejected tended, in turn, to reject school. We argue that it is dangerous and misleading to discount the role of the school system itself in the promotion of truancy. Selection in third and fourth year has been one of the ways in which the school system has attempted to manage unresolved issues of difficulty and motivation (part 2) and it has given different pupils different experiences of schooling. It is therefore possible to see the scale and patterning of truancy as evidence that forces us to acknowledge limits to the application of the theory concerning the potency of education that has underpinned educational expansion in general (chapter 1) and the incrementalist strategy for certification in particular (chapter 4). Where that theory cannot be applied, it may be rational for pupils to truant and for teachers to connive. The pathology may be systemic, however much it may also be individual.
