Press Release

TRUANCY

6 May 2008

Commenting on the latest truancy figures, Christine Blower, Acting General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Europe’s largest teaching union said;

“The Government needs to draw the obvious lessons from the latest truancy figures. There are no magic solutions to tackling core truancy. Schools do their best to deal with persistent truancy but they cannot, on their own, address deep-rooted social problems which lead to truancy.

“The threat of legal sanctions against parents of truants, while a continuing backstop, cannot represent a coherent strategy for truancy. There is no substitute for working with individual families. This should be complemented by giving schools the freedom to make the curriculum as flexible as possible in order to engage school refusers”.