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If Labour is serious about boosting school attendance by cutting benefits to truants’ families it ought to check out US states’ experience of Learnfare programmes. Could such schemes work here, asks education welfare officer Ming Zhang.

The government is apparently still considering withdrawing child benefit from parents whose children truant from school. A similar scheme was introduced in the US 15 years ago resulting in large savings on welfare payments to low income families but less clear benefits for children’s education.

Under the Learnfare programme, which has been implemented in several states, every parent claiming state benefits must agree to the benefit agency (the Department of Transitional Assistance) collecting the school attendance records of their school-age children once every school quarter (45 days). Benefits agencies have an agreement with local schools that the staff will report school attendance information directly to local DTA offices.

Each school is supposed to report the number of unexcused absences of each child benefit recipient. Parents must sign a release to waiver their right to privacy regarding their children’s school records. Those who educate their children at home must bring proof in to their local benefit agency in the form of a letter from a local school stating that they are satisfied with the home education arrangement.

If a child misses more than four school days in the 45-day school quarter without school’s authorisation, the family’s benefit entitlement is put on "probation."

If the same child has more than three half-day absences during the next month, the family will lose between $62 and $92 a month of child benefits, depending on the state. The family will continue to lose about that sum per month in benefits for each child on probation and with more than three unauthorised absences in any school month. The same child will remain on probation until he or she meets the Learnfare requirements of a good school attendance record. If a child has more than three absences for three consecutive months, the benefits agencies will refer the case to the Department of Social Services which will then contact the family to carry out further investigation with a view to assessing the child’s needs.

Sickness, religious holidays, the death of an immediate family member or a crisis situation are accepted as valid excuses for absence but only if the parents can produce the evidence. Sickness must be authorised by a doctor if it lasts more than four days, and parents may be asked for a letter confirming a religious holiday from a religious leader. A death certificate has to be produced if a child is kept away from school by bereavement, and the benefits agency decides what counts as a "crisis".

There are no exceptions for children who are disabled or who have been expelled or suspended from a school with no access to alternative education. Some families’ child welfare assistance was "sanctioned" simply because parents did not believe the current educational provisions were suitable to their children’s needs and therefore refused to let their children attend school.

The Wisconsin "miracle"
The scheme was first introduced in Wisconsin, where it covers all children of compulsory school age.

When the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was commissioned to evaluate the scheme it examined the records of 56,000 Learnfare subjects and found that their school attendance had not improved.¹ In fact, nearly half of the pupils whose families lost benefits because of their poor attendance had dropped out of school completely after a year of Learnfare.

But by the time the first results of the research were released in 1995, Wisconsin’s Learnfare initiative had already been hailed as a "Wisconsin welfare miracle" by the US national press. Hundreds of delegates from home and abroad were received by the state offices to witness Wisconsin’s shining example. So amid overwhelmingly positive press coverage of their Learnfare experience, Wisconsin’s Department of Health and Social Services challenged the methodology of the research carried out by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and requested a revision of the findings. Of course, it was refused. The department then immediately discontinued the research contract with the university and started an evaluation programme to be carried out by the state auditor himself.

The state auditor was also unable to find evidence that Learnfare had any detectable effect on enrolment or attendance for the pupils in younger groups or for the teenagers as a whole.² But according to the auditor’s subsequent reports, Wisconsin Learnfare had produced some positive effects on the school attendance of teenagers in a few groups, specifically teenage parents, teenagers who were not enrolled in school at the time they were introduced to Learnfare and 18 to 19 year olds. Not surprisingly it was also found that Learnfare generated substantial savings on state welfare costs through the sanction imposed on school absentees’ households.

Great leap forward?
Following Wisconsin’s Learnfare example, Ohio introduced new federal welfare reform legislation in 1996. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act 1996 required that teenage parents under the age of 18 be enrolled in school or in an approved education or training programme if they were to receive federal funds under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families programme. This led to the introduction of Ohio’s "Learning, Earning, and Parenting" (Leap) project, which used a system of cash rewards for good school attendance by teenage parents as well as welfare sanctions for poor school attendance.

An evaluation of the outcomes of the programme found mixed results.³ Some 93 per cent of enrolled teenage parents experienced at least one upward or downward adjustment in their grants. It did not, however, have a significant effect on high school graduation rates, although it did significantly increase the proportion of teenage parents receiving a Diploma of General Education Development.

Over a four-year period, the programme had a significant effect on employment outcomes for teenage parents who were already enrolled in school when they began participating in Leap. It did not have a significant effect for those who had already left school before beginning their participation.

The study concludes that the programme reduced overall state welfare assistance costs for young people in Ohio. Teenage parents, however, on average, experienced an income loss of approximately $1,100 over a four-year period.

Both Wisconsin’s "welfare miracle" and Ohio’s Leap experience indicate that Learnfare can save money for states through the sanctions imposed on low-income households. However, implementation of programmes is also highly costly and potentially divisive, as the New York state experience shows.

A short-lived affair
Learnfare in New York was enacted through the Welfare Reform Act 1997. In that year, New York’s Learnfare began as a pilot programme in New York City and three upstate counties. In September 1998, six more counties were added, and the following September the programme was implemented state-wide.

New York’s Learnfare policy-makers had noted that evaluations of the Wisconsin programme did not show improvements in attendance and that University of Wisconsin’s 1995 report actually showed a decline in attendance by two-thirds of urban Learnfare participants from 1998-2001 and an increase in the number of children opting out of school.

However, the idea was politically popular for the Republicans and the Democrats and it was considered that the failure of the Wisconsin programme was due to it having to deal with "hard-core" and older school absentees.

So, instead of targeting pupils at high schools, New York state’s programme, which was otherwise similar to Wisconsin’s, focused on children at elementary schools.

Problems for New York’s programme began when parents of children receiving temporary assistance to needy families (Tanf) were asked to sign a release waiving their right to privacy under the Federal Educational Privacy Act. Some refused and were threatened with the termination of their benefits. Parents held the schools responsible for this and school staff became the target of hostile and intimidating behaviour.

Amid the furore, state legislators cancelled future development plans and the New York Learnfare programme fizzled out. Reports suggested that the troubled programme had not had much impact on school attendance.⁴

What about a UK version?
There has already been plenty of debate about the wisdom or morality of taking away welfare assistance from children who are already in poverty. But what are the practical issues in implementing a UK version of Learnfare initiative, especially its implication for front-line practitioners such as teachers, social workers and education welfare officers?

Learnfare programmes in the US found that agencies became increasingly tied up with explaining to parents on state benefits why they had to sign a contract surrendering their right to privacy and how the Learnfare programme worked. This was not an easy task especially when most parents felt that they were being penalised for being on state benefits.

This issue raises the question of who would be responsible for implementing this scheme if our government decides to go ahead with docking child benefit from families of truanting children. Would it be schools, local education authorities, the benefit agency or even social services? The US experience indicates huge implementation costs although these were generally balanced by the savings in school absentees’ welfare assistance. Looking at it cynically, the more pupils fail to attend school, the more money is saved by welfare agencies. Inevitably, such a programme would require schools, local education authorities and the Department for Work and Pensions to co-ordinate their roles in implementing the scheme.

The second question is which groups of pupils would the programme focus on. As we have seen, there is no evidence of US Learnfare achieving its stated goal of reducing truancy. The Wisconsin experience turned out only to be effective in getting teenage parents and pregnant schoolgirls to register themselves on a school’s roll, but failed to make them attend more regularly. Both New York’s and Wisconsin’s experiences suggest that such initiatives have no impact on younger pupils’ attendance records at all.

So, is it worth importing Learnfare in order only to get our pregnant schoolgirls and teenage parents enrolled at school? These pupils represent only a very small proportion of school absentees in UK and most of them are already on the school roll.

We know that the government’s intention is to tackle truancy problem as a whole. Learnfare in US has failed to do this.

¹ L Quinn, "Using Threats of Poverty to Promote School Attendance: Implications of Wisconsin’s Learnfare Experiment for Families", Journal of Children and Poverty, Vol 1, no 2: 1995, pp5-16

² D Cattanach, state auditor, An Evaluation of Implication of Learnfare Expansion, Legislative Audit Bureau, State of Wisconsin, 1997

³ D Long, J Gueron, R Wood, R Fisher, V Fellerath, Final Report on Ohio’s Welfare Initiative to Improve School Attendance Among Teenage Parents - Ohio’s Learning Earning and Parenting Program, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, 1997

⁴ A Barbosa, New York Learnfare Falls Short, The Education Priority Panel, 2001

Also see ABT Associates, "ABT Associates Find Welfare Children Miss More School than Others." ABT Associates Publication, April, 2000.

Ming Zhang is principal education welfare officer, Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames.