School Organization and Persistent School Absenteeism: An Introduction to a Complex Problem

Reflections of being “A Man of Truancy”: 40 years on

“…Reid 1981;1982a, 1982b, 1982c, 1982d, 1982e, 1983a, 1983b, 1983c, 1984a, 1984b, 1984c, 1985a, 1986, 1987, 1989aHopkins and Reid 1985;Reid, Hopkins, and Holly 1988) on truancy and school absenteeism. Since then, and to this day, there has rarely been a period when I have not been involved in some way into truancy or related fields.…”

The Behaviour of Persistent School Absentees

“…If so, the importance of the pupils' self-concepts are again apparent. Furthermore, the precise correlation between the low self-concepts of Persistent Absentees (Reid, 1982a) and their behaviour in school is another area which requires further research.…”

“…In stage one, the Persistent Absentees and good attenders were selected and matched. The second part of the enquiry investigated and compared the social and educational backgrounds of the pupils (Reid, 1981(Reid, , 1982a) using a social anthropological approach (Stubbs and Delamont, 1976). In the third stage, the Rutter (1967) Children's Behaviour Questionnaire was used.…”

“…UNTIL the late 1970s there was an imbalance in the amount of research undertaken into school absenteeism. Even now, much more is known about some of the home background (Tyerman, 1968), social (May, 1975) and psychological (Reid, 1982a) than institutional (Reynolds et al, 1976;Rutter et al, 1979) processes involved in this phenomenon (Reid and Kendall, 1982).…”

“…A few accounts exist of the way in which ordinary secondary schools have tried to overcome their own absenteeism problem (Jones, 1980;Reid, 1982b). Much more, however, has been written about how units in ordinary and ' special ' schools cope with their chronic truancy cases (Grunsell, 1978).…”