Truancy is detrimental to children's educational progress. Parents, being the first authority at home, share an equal responsibility with schools to thwart it. Unlike developed countries, many nations, e.g. India, have no legal actions or policies for truancy. A considerable gap in identifying any specific form of involvement from the parents…

Objective: The original 24-item School Refusal Assessment Scale-Revised (SRAS-R) assesses four functions/conditions regarding school refusal behavior (SRB), bridging assessments, and treatments of SRB. No validated Chinese versions are available. Methods: To validate the Chinese version of the SRAS-R, an anonymous cross-sectional survey was…

The authors report on a youth agency study conducted in post-conflict school settings in Sri Lanka. In a three-month field-based, qualitative research study, youth collaborated with the first author to explain and expand on their interviews. Their candor and concern for ensuring that the researcher understood the rationales behind their actions…

Using newly released detailed data on absence from school, we find a 'Friday effect'--children are much less likely to attend schools in England on Fridays. We use daily level data across the whole of England and find that this pattern holds for different schools and for different types of absence, including illness-related authorised and…

Truancy is a long-standing and serious educational issue. The debates surrounding truancy are complex as the concept of truancy means different things to different researchers. Data from a grounded theory, qualitative doctoral study is used to investigate how a sample of thirteen young people explained the nature of truancy, which they referred to…

Studies consistently show the detrimental effect of school absences on pupils' achievement. However, due to an accumulation of multiple risks, school absenteeism may be more harmful to achievement among pupils from lower socioeconomic status (SES). Using a sample of upper-secondary students from the Scottish Longitudinal Study (n = 3,135), we…

Despite mandatory school attendance policies, many students in Canada are frequently absent from school. Absenteeism is linked to numerous negative educational outcomes and is a growing educational issue internationally. This has lead universities in many countries to study the factors associated with absenteeism in order to reduce it. However,…

This longitudinal study of 1,066 Finnish students examined bidirectional reciprocal relationships between changes in perceived supportive school climate and changes in self-reported truancy from the last year of primary school (Grade 6) to the last year of lower secondary school (Grade 9). The results of the random intercept cross-lagged panel…

This paper provides an analysis of Australia's legal provisions and policies regarding truancy. We examine how low frequency truants feature in Australia's truancy law and policy and highlight similarities and differences in the cultural-legal context between Australian states and territories. Similarities include requirements to attend school…

School refusal is a serious problem that negatively affects academic performance, connection to school, and socioemotional well-being of students. Numerous scientific works have suggested that school refusal is associated with internalizing problems. However, it is necessary to determine how this condition may affect certain academic variables,…

Studies consistently show associations between school absences and academic achievement. However, questions remain about whether this link depends on the reason for children's absence. Using a sample of the Scottish Longitudinal Study (n = 4,419), we investigated whether the association between school absenteeism and achievement in high-stakes…

The views of the children and young people experiencing Extended School Non-Attendance difficulties are scarcely represented in the literature. This systematic literature review provides a much needed overview of the existing research evidence through a detailed synthesis of the lived experiences of persistently non-attending young people, using a…

This study examined the symptoms of exhaustion, school stress and anxious school refusal from a comparative developmental perspective in French adolescents enrolled in public and private general, technological and vocational schools. It is particularly important to consider academic stress levels, anxiety and school burnout in middle and high…

In New Zealand/Aotearoa, high levels of secondary school absenteeism are a nationwide problem. Absenteeism is associated with a range of adverse outcomes for individuals and has detrimental effects on society. Since the global COVID-19 pandemic, with the government closing schools during lockdowns, absenteeism has reached epidemic proportions as…

The latest round of fiscal austerity in Ghana has meant that the feeding rate paid to the service providers of Ghana's school feeding programme is both frozen and unrealistically low. Accordingly, service providers adopt discretionary coping strategies. This qualitative case study, therefore, explores the impacts of austerity on children's school…