Tony Blair was apparently shocked to find out that so many parents are condoning truancy. In fact as The TES reports on page 6, the notorious 80 per cent figure he cites is probably too high.
Besides, not all truants are out on the streets. Some simply go home again once their parents have left for work. But most teachers could have told the Prime Minister that truancy is usually a family problem.
We don’t know nearly enough about why children bunk off school or what they do when they are truanting.
Twenty years ago, I wrote an article about how truants spend their time. In those less pressured times, I was able to spend whole days hanging about in city centres talking to young people who looked as if they should be in school.
Of course they were highly suspicious of my inquiries - and nearly everyone had an excuse ready. A small boy intent on an arcade game swore that his mum had sent him down to town to get his shoes mended - and he had some in an old carrier bag to prove it.
A 14-year-old playing snooker in the middle of the afternoon strove to convince me - as did the manager of the hall - that he had permission from his parents and his school to spend every afternoon there practising - since he was about to hit the big time.
Numerous women had young girls hanging on to their arms, and seemed to think that shopping for clothes justified missing school. A boy was helping his uncle out on a market stall. A girl was frying the onions for her mother who ran a hamburger stand.
Many of these families were struggling - and not only economically. Parents can feel helpless if their children are bullied at school, and are persuaded by their offspring to take the easy way out.
Depressed mothers like to keep their daughters at home for comfort. Sometime the roles are reversed, and the children are the carers. One boy, who couldn’t have been more than 12, was gazing in a grimy shop window while his baby sister snoozed in her pushchair.
He didn’t go to school, he told me. They’d moved house a lot, and he didn’t know what school he should go to. Anyway, his mum had a bad back, so every morning he got his three brothers and sisters off to primary school, and then took the little one out. He’d be off home soon, to get his mum something to eat.
Tony Blair has been much derided for his suggestion that families who condone truancy should forfeit their child benefit; they have enough problems already. But he is right to be casting around for a solution which addresses truancy as a family, not an individual problem.
Simply herding these children back into school is not the answer. Each family’s problems should be identified and addressed - and this will take patience, expertise - and money.
Many children will need extra support and special programmes. The police may be able to help in some cases, but involving the agents of the law will hardly be a panacea.
Interviewing three lively teenage girls who were playing on the swings in the park at 11 o’clock on a sunny morning, I asked what they did when it rained. They sat in the magistrates’ court, they said. It was warm and dry, and there were so many young people waiting about for their cases to be heard that no one noticed you were there.
