Why won’t they go…? Looking at absenteeism in a local high school setting

This piece of research was undertaken by Wetherby High School (WHS) and The Salvation Army at Wetherby (WSA). The partners wanted to address the subject of school attendance to help them understand more fully the issues that particular children are facing within the school context and in so doing, seek to remove any obstacles that prevent children from attending school. WHS allowed WSA access to school data and Local Education Authority (LEA) information on attendance. A number of one to one interviews with individual young people and their parents were undertaken and then children and parents brought together as peer groups to review the same questions. Evidence and data gathered resulted in four clear themes: • curriculum based issues – Year 10 and 11 boys in particular found the classroom was “boring”. Some of these boys had been involved in an alternative timetable but it still revolved around the curriculum core and therefore was not “different enough”; • social challenges – parents felt trapped because they were often at work when the school contacted them to say their child had not arrived and they had often struggled with attendance at school; • home and family related issues – a number of young people felt trapped in homes where they had either experience the trauma of a parents’ marriage breaking up or where they stated that home was a ‘far from happy place’; • emotional challenges – a number of young people had at some point been under the care of the Educational Psychologist, experiencing emotional trauma caused by a ‘crisis’ or struggling to cope with the demands that school life was throwing at them. It is clear there are some very real challenges in enabling young people and their families to address their educational needs. This research has gone some way to helping WHS and WSA consider how to support young people and their families, one result being the employment of a family support worker