Tony Blair spends 1billion on truancy and fails

Laura Clark at Daily Mail

Although ministers have spent £1billion trying to tackle truancy, figures show that almost a million children, aged 11 and over, dodged some of their lessons in the last school year.

Almost 220,000 "persistent absentees" miss the equivalent of nearly two days a week through truancy, illness or term-time holidays.

And the problem is much worse than previously thought. A new system of collecting data has found that truancy levels are 18 per cent higher than previous Government statistics showed. The difference amounts to an extra 7,000 skipping school every day.

Absence agreed by schools, including holidays taken during term and sick days, is also up.

The breakdown shows that almost 43,000 pupils a day skipped school in 2005/06 - against 36,200 under the old system for calculating absence, in the same year.

The old system of calculating truancy relied on averages compiled by schools once a year. The new data has been calculated by officials using raw information supplied by schools.

Even under that system, ministers had missed their targets on truancy. Their aim was to cut unauthorised absence by a third by 2002.

But they had to reduce their own target. The Government then said it wanted to cut truancy by ten per cent by 2004. But this did not happen either.

Truancy across primary and secondary schools rose to record levels last year. Although the new data so far covers only secondary schools, it is likely a similar trend of under-estimation will emerge at primary level.

Last year the Education Department said this Government had spent £885million on improving attendance and behaviour. The total is now thought to exceed £1billion.

It has been used for schemes such as town centre truancy sweeps, during which police and welfare staff question children found outside during school hours. Electronic registration systems have also been introduced. Meanwhile, Labour has introduced tougher sanctions against parents who condone truancy.

The Government has responded with another initiative - text message alerts for parents if children fail to turn up for registration.

Schools Minister Jim Knight said: "Parents have a critical role to play. We know from truancy sweeps that around half of all children caught out of school with no good reason are found with an adult."

(ED: So Big Big headlines about how Tony is going to sort out a terrible social evil, throw a lot of tax payers money at the problem, discovery that the problem is harder to sort out than all the alleged brains in New Labour thought it would be and then try to cover off the mess with a fatuous announcement. Seems like business as usual for Tony and New Labour.

Oh by the way Tony half the kids caught playing truant are with their parents so a text to the parents to tell them their child is not at school is even stupider than it first appears.)