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Most people would associate truancy with errant teenagers. This would make the education welfare officer's job one of fighting a battle to get 14, 15 and 16-year-olds back to school. But it is a battle more than likely being lost before the children even reach secondary school.

This is the most startling finding to emerge from an analysis of child poverty levels and school absence rates in London. Truancy rates in London local education authorities between 1997 and 2000 were studied, together with information collected through a postal survey of 90 London education welfare practitioners and 98 face-to-face interviews with the parents.

The study found that school absenteeism is strongly associated with child poverty, with pupils at primary school being much more likely to be affected by an area's economic and employment deprivation than their counterparts at secondary schools. Potential school absentees normally start the habit of non-attendance when they are at primary school, with child poverty as a main associated factor. The study suggests that, at this early stage, addressing family welfare issues may stop truanting behaviour or at least prevent the problem becoming entrenched.

Failure to act early in a child's school career may mean that child poverty is replaced by other influences. For example, peer relationships, school work and youth offending become progressively more important factors once potential absentees are at secondary schools. At this late stage, it is often too late to achieve sustainable improvement in school attendance by addressing family welfare.

In those London local education authorities with the highest child poverty levels, the school absence rates were among the worst. The areas with fewer child poverty problems enjoyed the best attendance records. Richmond, Kingston, Sutton, Harrow and Bromley are the five LEA areas with the lowest number of children living in poverty while Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Newham, Islington and Haringey top the capital's child poverty list.

The findings will come as a surprise to the education welfare practitioners who took part in the postal survey. They considered that pupils at secondary schools were more likely to be affected by family financial difficulties. Parents who were interviewed explained that they were more likely to forget their younger children's schooling if they were troubled by financial difficulties.

Secondary school pupils, by contrast, are exposed more than younger children to non-familial factors that affect school attendance. One example is peer group influence which may cause a group of secondary school pupils to "bunk off" school together in order to frequent town centres. This rarely takes place among younger children at primary schools. Pupils at primary schools mostly rely on their parents to get them to school and are normally with their parents outside school hours.

The findings strongly suggest that education welfare practitioners should begin work with absentee children while they are still in primary school, even though truanting is often less severe at this age than it is later on. Otherwise, once the habit of absenteeism is formed, it is difficult to eradicate even if the family has come out of poverty. Other factors intervene at secondary school age that continue to affect a child's attendance. At primary school, the professional focus should be on children's welfare as well as their schooling. While the government's children's fund initiative signals a move in the right direction, more needs to be done to address the issue of child poverty in order to achieve a lasting impact on school attendance.


More than 61 per cent of the parents interviewed had children with attendance problems. It was clear that these parents believe that parental attitudes and parenting skills are vital to good school attendance. However, parents did not think that parental attitudes and skills were always enough on their own to resolve their children's truanting behaviour. They considered that appropriate professional help was equally important in achieving good school attendance records. The education welfare practitioners who took part in the study tended to believe that good parental skills and attitudes were sufficient to make a difference on their own.

Nevertheless, neither the absentees' parents nor the practitioners consider parental prosecution as an effective measure to tackle truancy problems with parents actually having slightly more faith in parental prosecution than education welfare practitioners.

Another surprising finding was that the majority of parents did not blame schools for their children's absence. Parents did not consider boring lessons as a significant reason for absence. This finding disagrees with some earlier studies on absenteeism in which pupils indicated that irrelevant school curricula and poor quality of lesson delivery were the main reasons for absenteeism.

Ming Zhang is principal education welfare officer at the London Borough of Kingston and a researcher at Magdalene College, Cambridge

Figures behind the facts

The study found that the link between child poverty levels and the absence rates at primary school was particularly strong, with a correlation coefficient ranging from 0.700 to 0.855 (max = 1) recorded in the three-year period between 1997 and 2000.

However, the link between child poverty and absence rates at secondary schools is weaker, although still statistically significant. For the same period, a correlation coefficient of 0.495 to 0.562 was recorded. Using other surrogate child poverty indicators such as the government's employment deprivation indicators, income deprivation indicators, and free school meal take-up rates all confirm the significance of the association between child poverty and school absenteeism, and the difference between secondary schools and primary schools.

The data indicated a trend over the three years of increasingly strong relationships between child poverty and school absence rates at primary schools in London. However, the association between child poverty and absenteeism steadily decreased at secondary schools.