Truancy is a problem that has been around as long as schools themselves have existed, and a hundred years from now it will probably still be a problem. There can be few schools who can, hand on heart, claim to have no absenteeism at all. The statistics tell a disturbing story: over 1,000,000 children are absent from school every year, and on a typical school day 50,000 children are not in school. Overall, in excess of eight million school days are lost across the UK each year through unauthorised absence – and, reacting to these figures, the Government has set attendance rate targets this year for secondary schools at 92 per cent and primary schools at 95 per cent.
However, schools do have a new weapon available to fight truancy nowadays – the communications revolution. As with every other aspect of modern education, computers and other information and communications technology can be deployed to help reduce truancy and absenteeism in schools, and in a number of ways. This doesn’t come for free, however, and to help schools to achieve these targets, the Government has pledged £500m to anti-truancy schemes and strategies, in addition to a £12m Home Office grant towards other ways of reducing juvenile crime associated with truancy.
In considering what ICT-based solutions are available, however, we can start with what schools already have – and a valuable technological tool which can be an important factor in tackling unauthorised absence is already installed almost everywhere. Management information systems (MIS) are becoming ubiquitous in UK schools as the volume of records which they are required to keep escalates ever higher. The MIS helps to automate many of the record-keeping and analysis tasks associated with a school’s bookkeeping, including financial management, assessment monitoring – and, of course, attendance.
An MIS can do more than simply hold records of attendance: many now have the capability to display the information graphically and allow some very sophisticated analysis. Schools can use this tool to spot trends and target times when pupils are most likely to skip school, or determine if pupils from different year groups are absent at the same time. This kind of detailed analysis would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, using paper-based records.