Role of secondary schools in the face of student absenteeism: a study of schools in socially underprivileged areas

Abstract

This paper analyses the reactions to absenteeism in public secondary schools in underprivileged areas of the city of Barcelona, Spain. The data presented are part of a doctoral thesis undertaken after the implementation of the Spanish comprehensive education reform (LOGSE) and they draw attention to important differences between schools. The study examines schools’ practices in the face of absenteeism and assesses their proactive or reactive responses to the requirements of student inclusion, studying their working methods and teacher cultures.

Notes

1. Symbolic control agencies refer to the whole series of authorities and agents specialized in the discursive codes that are predominant and distribute forms of consciousness, social relations, and dispositions. Among them, the author refers to those agencies and agents whose function is to diagnose, foresee, solve or isolate what they consider ‘deviated’; the author is referring especially to some specialized services such as medical, psychiatric or social services. The research does not aim to apply this theoretical framework to several agencies with responsibilities in dealing with truants: school teachers, social workers and others educational welfare officers, police, judges, etc. The difficulties and contradictory views and policies between them remain to be explored.

2. The aspects of collaboration and collegiality that adopt a form of shared decisions and coordinated work of the teachers are factors that appear to be correlated with some positive school results in surveys on school efficiency (Rutter et al., 1979; Reynolds, 1985; Mortimore et al., 1988; Smith, 1988).

3. In Catalonia, the Department of Education is developing an Urgent Initiative Against School Failure in which measures to counter absenteeism in secondary education will be one of the priorities. Nonetheless, it will require some years to gauge the success of the measures.

4. ‘In the primary schools where there is collaboration and consensus, these protected communities hide a trend to leadership styles that are somehow paternalist, as well as a certain localism’ (Hargreaves, 1994, p. 62).

5. ‘The school system in secondary education, developed within the context of modernity, has limited the collaboration between different knowledge areas, provoking pedagogic incoherence, a competitive territoriality, and the lack of opportunities for some teachers to learn from others and to offer mutual support’ (Hargreaves, 1994, p. 47).

6. According to research by the ‘Consortium of Chicago School Research and the Chicago Public School’ (CPS) absenteeism from specific subjects is a common form of absenteeism amongst adolescent secondary school students. Nonetheless, it is rarely registered by the schools (Roderick et al., 1996; http://www.consortium‐chicago.org).

7. Catalonia has recently passed a National Pact for Education (2006), which will enable this kind of initiative through Local Plans.