Eliciting solutions from narratives of re-attending secondary school pupils

• Main Author: Tasker-Smith, Kay
• Published: University of Sheffield 2011
• Subjects: 371.294
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.577992

Developed from 8 biographical accounts of secondary school re-attenders, this thesis explores the concept of non attendance and uses a solution focussed methodology to consider how participants have succeeded in returning to school and increased their attendance. Much research around attendance focuses on reasons for non-attendance within a medicalised perspective. Within the context of this research, schools, parents, peers and the local authority are found to be sources of solutions to nonattendance, whilst relationships, interventions, educational values, and the pupil's cost-benefit analysis of their situation are found to be solutions to re-attendance. Pupils develop their own self help solutions. Pupils perceive the local authority as offering contingency management as a solution, specifically in the form of sanction. In choosing to re-attend secondary school, pupils made either an uninformed (easiest path) or informed choice by taking account of social pressures, consequences, personal needs, goals and values. Either way, the benefits of attending school outweighed the costs, and through a process of supplantive learning, school re-attendance occurred. An 'attendance team around the child', made up of family, school and peers was promoted as a new solution based on the importance of partnership working.