Absenteeism In European Schools

This book is the first detailed survey of absenteeism in Europe. It is the result of a research carried out by the partners of the EU project "Absenteeism - Strategies, Concepts and Materials to Fight Truancy" in 17 European countries. The country reports include detailed information about national statistics on absenteeism as well as general strategies and exemplary projects to fight truancy The book is completed by summarized recommendations for dealing with the problem of absenteeism and includes a glossary.

This new book on school attendance and behaviour brings an international flavour to the field, with contributions on some of the latest empirical research and thinking from around the world. It includes contributions from Canada and the USA, Hong Kong, Europe, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Some of the interesting, wide-ranging, and often unique topics covered in the book include: truancy and well-being, disaffection, pupil absenteeism, social mediation, aggression in primary schools, bullying, emotional barriers to learning, behaviour management training, exclusion, reintegration, the role of educational psychologists, and ethnic diversity and classroom disruption in the context of migration policies. The book should prove both helpful and useful for a wide range of professionals, students, and academics, across a wide range of educational, care, and social policy disciplines. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Studies.

The aim of the study is to explore how school absenteeism as a material-discursive phenomenon is produced in the practices of humans and nonhumans, when absences and presences are registered and managed through digital technologies. How is the phenomenon of school absenteeism produced when absences and presences are digitally registered? How does the phenomenon of school absenteeism emerge when both human and nonhuman entanglements are included in the apparatuses of knowing? Through a posthumanist approach, the study engages empirically with two types of software for the registration of absences and presences at three Swedish schools. The results show that digital registration blurs the division between absences and presences, and queers what is absent and what is present. Digital registration produces school absenteeism as a phenomenon for all students every day, and at the same time as mainly for the students who are present most of the time. A conclusion that is drawn from the study is that digital registration makes absences present, by the visualization and performative repetition of the registration. The study points to how school absenteeism is always ‘in the making’, and proposes the concept of school absenteeing as a productive way to open up new possibilities in relation to students’ absences.