Deborah Coddington: Tough love the way to reduce wagging

"Jenny" doesn't go to school if she can help it. She lives in a South Island city with her mum, her stepdad and, until recently, her older brother. Jenny's real dad is in jail and her teenage brother has been getting into trouble.

There was a family group conference. Real dad (against whom Jenny's mum has a protection order) was allowed to attend by telephone. So was Jenny's uncle, also a convicted criminal. After the conference Jenny's uncle told another parent at Jenny's school the private details of the conference. That parent told her daughter, who happens to be in Jenny's class.

Now Jenny doesn't want to go to school, and Jenny's mum is desperate to try to repair the damage done to her daughter by the stupid actions of a former brother-in-law.

In Auckland, Bailey Junior Kurariki didn't want to go to school, either. His mother, Lorraine West, blamed the schools and told her son when he was 10 that it didn't matter if he got biffed out of school.

She never taught him right from wrong and three years later he became New Zealand's youngest convicted murderer for killing pizza deliverer Michael Choy.

Two totally different situations with one commonality - truancy.

To be sure, these are extreme cases, with tragic consequences. Truancy statistics, like all statistics, should be treated with caution.

I'll be the first to put my hand up as a parent and own up to the fact that every one of my four children has, at least once, skived off school for a half-day.

There is nicer mail to open than letters from school that begin, "your daughter is a truant". And before some sleuth reporter tracks down my schoolmates, I'll admit to running away from a Lower Hutt boarding school in 1968, getting as far as Palmerston North.

But what is our objective in reducing truancy rates - getting children back in school no matter what or trying to find out why kids won't go to school?

Teachers and principals must be able to rely on parents to get their children to school. When they don't turn up, teachers blame parents. But parents, in turn, blame teachers, accusing them - usually unjustifiably - of picking on their children. No one accepts responsibility and we all blame the Government.

There are definitely parents who could accurately be described as educationally irresponsible.

Dr Edwin West, the British economist whose 1965 book Education and the State remains the seminal work to challenge education statists, says even the strongest 19th-century supporters of laissez-faire believed that defenceless children must be an exception to the general principle of freedom contract.

Parents do not have absolute power over their children, therefore there should be minimal state regulation so education is available to all youngsters. When parents prevent this, the state can intervene, as in the case of child abuse.

But should we confuse education with schooling? Can we reasonably expect every single child to fit the state-imposed model of sitting in class for most of the day with 30 to 40 other peers, one teacher, forced to learn a prescriptive - and currently politically correct - Government-owned curriculum?

Dr James Tooley, professor of education at the University of Newcastle, calls this technologically primitive and one reason children become disruptive, then stop learning. He says children might not necessarily be anti-education, but just resistant to school.

Teenagers, with their mood swings, grumpiness and unpredictability are even more difficult to cram into this one-size-fits-all mould. So we witnessed scenes of genuine grief outside Auckland Metropolitan College in 2001 when Trevor Mallard closed it. Some of those pupils, unable to fit into the rigid structure of conventional state schools, but by no means bad children, may figure in today's truancy figures.

Tooley, in his book Education Without the State, reminds us of days before the Government monopolised education delivery, when teenagers spent time with adults other than their classroom teachers - learning on the job, if you like, on farms, in shops, at church, with artists, writers and poets. They were not "imprisoned" for six hours a day, peer-pressured to be naughty.

Nevertheless, tough love is essential. In Britain the Labour Government has got harsh with educationally irresponsible parents and it is working. It is called the "Amos effect" after mother-of-five Patricia Amos who was jailed for failing to insist two of her teenage daughters attended school.

The prosecution followed two years of frustrated attempts by authorities to make her comply, but she thumbed her nose at the Local Education Authority, believing they would never carry out their threats.

They did. There was a predictable outcry until she was released from Holloway 28 days later and proclaimed: "It worked. My girls felt guilty and they go to school now. I deserved what I got. Every child needs an education."

The thought of one month in solitary was incentive enough, it seems, to make other parents more responsible.

The jailing coincided with a truancy sweep in May, when police officers patrolled shopping malls and trouble spots in Britain and caught 12,000 children playing truant. About half of them were with their parents.

Now some schools are piloting initiatives like swipecards, so at least the schools can keep track more accurately of who is and who isn't being educated.

And this is part of the problem in New Zealand. This month I received a cri de coeur from a truancy officer showing a snapshot set of figures proving New Zealand truancy officers do have good outcomes in getting students to attend school or assisting them into a course or job.

For instance, in Porirua last year, of 330 truants there were 217 good outcomes. But truancy officers, who by necessity work full-time, are only paid part-time.

Experienced officers burn out and move on. Since 1998 there has been no increase in funding from the Minister of Education, and there is still no national data base, partly because the ministry cannot define clearly just what truancy is. Truancy causes harm. One day the child we feel sorry for and want to rescue turns into the murderer we want to throttle.

Children whose parents take their responsibilities seriously will usually overcome minor misspent half-days. But instead of blaming someone else, we need to make a co-ordinated effort to tackle this problem, to start throwing some starfish back into the sea.

Starfish? Haven't you heard about the boy who found hundreds of dying starfish left behind by the tide and started throwing them back. His father tried gently to stop him, telling him there were too many, he would never make a difference. At which point the boy threw another one back and said, "I made a difference to that one".

* Deborah Coddington is an Act MP.