”Help them follow the proper path”

ABSTRACT

The idea that we ought to help young people with underlying issues, rather than simply pressure them back to school has gained traction in the literature on absence from school. However, this discussion has not considered how help and control are intertwined. The following is a Foucault inspired qualitative study of absence interventions in a school in Denmark aiming to critically explore this. Using positioning theory conjoined with Butler’s notions of recognisability and support networks, I show that these interventions form a normative context: regular attendance is the proper path towards a good life. Within this context, young people were seen as having a choice, despite school being compulsory. When the young people and parents attempt to negotiate this choice, they end up escalating the pressure instead. In order for help not to escalate into increased pressure, I argue that we need more flexibility regarding the politics of compulsory school.

KEYWORDS:

• Absence from school
• compulsory school
• help
• intervention
• normativity

1. Introduction

New forms of digital registrations have made absence from school not only an issue for compulsory school laws but also an accountability measure, as well as becoming an important indicator of the excellence of schools across the globe (Hough, 2019; OECD, 2016). In Denmark specifically, this has led to new laws for registration practices and municipalities to fine parents whose children’s absence exceed 15% illegal absence (Bekendtgørelse Om Elevers Fravær Fra Undervisningen i Folkeskolen, 2019). Such political attention spurs both interventions and an interest in finding more effective interventions to reduce absence (Sutphen et al., 2010).

Recent studies have begun paying attention to what schools can do to prevent and combat absence (Havik et al., 2015). The relationship between teachers and children is especially highlighted as a potential preventive factor against absence (Ekstrand, 2015) as well as a powerful tool through which one can intervene (Keppens & Spruyt, 2017). Such interventions consist in building positive relationships with the young people to help them deal with their issues and in turn come back to school (Keppens & Spruyt, 2020). These ‘helping interventions’ are not exclusively focused on getting children to attend. They also attempt to address the underlying causes of absence and support students in meeting ‘the defined academic standards of the school, as well as, underlying social and behavioural standards.’ (Keppens & Spruyt, 2020, citing Christenson et. al. 2000). In Denmark, creating positive relationships with pupils is an old tradition and is something most teachers seek to cultivate (de Coninck-Smith et al., 2015). Furthermore, following global trends (Huxtable, 2022), schools in Denmark hire social workers to support the teachers in their work with the young people’s social well-being (Børne- Og Undervisningsministeriet, 2022) – making Danish schools an apt place to study the ‘helping approach.’

Importantly, the literature deems the helping approach better than the usual political focus on pressuring young people, sometimes through parents, back to school (Birioukov, 2020). However, little attention has been given to the normative and political contexts that frame helping interventions, such as the mentioned ‘underlying social and behavioural standards.’ While the research literature has criticised pressuring approaches for being ineffective and potentially harmful (Ekstrand, 2015; Keppens & Spruyt, 2020; Sutphen et al., 2010), it has not to a sufficient degree reflected on how helping approaches are influenced by the same normative and political contexts. The literature has therefore failed to account for the complexity of forces influencing absence interventions and their consequences (Knage, 2021). To tackle this gap, the present article utilises a critical approach inspired by Foucault (1977), which aims to critically engage with how the normative and political contexts frame which students’ absence is deemed problematic during daily school practice.

To this end, I followed a single school in Denmark and their practices of problematising and responding to absence. These practices were framed by the political and normative contexts in Denmark which are highly focused on reducing the number of absences in school (see also Frydenlund, 2022). I argue that while the staff at the school in question attempted the helping approach, their interventions took place in the political context where absence must be minimised and the normative context where the proper conduct of young people is clearly defined. Framed by these contexts, the help offered by the school staff was in fact an escalating exertion of pressure, controlling the young people’s choices.

2. Theory

To frame the article, I will use the Foucault-inspired positioning theory, as it has been developed by Davies (2008, 2011). She specifically turned the theory towards the normative context of schools, making it an apt choice for the current article. The normative context functions as a background against which phenomena, such as absence from school, stand out as a certain type of problem requiring a certain type of response. Davies, following Butler, argues that this normative context is ‘performative’ in the sense that it requires to be acted out and repeated to exist.

Positioning theory was developed to analyse these interactions as ongoing negotiations for meaning and identity. It proposes that the meaning of acts, the context for this meaning (the storyline), and the identity of the speaker and hearer (the positions) are interrelated and negotiated (Davies, 2008). Take the example of a teacher who tells a pupil that their absence numbers are too high and that they should do something about it. A school storyline is enacted through this utterance, defining the positions of the teacher and the pupil. Within this storyline, the teacher has a right to reprimand the young people (the meaning of the utterance) for not living up to the responsibilities of a pupil. The young person may of course protest that the school bus was to blame, thereby gaining the position of a pupil who does the best they can to attend school but is halted by matters beyond their control. The utterance thereby becomes that of an accusation and the teacher is positioned as someone who has misunderstood the problem or perhaps is even being unfair or biased. Through conversations and acts, we negotiate what the storyline is, which positions we have, and how we should understand what has been said and done.

The normative context is made up of the repetition of and negotiation of storylines, acts, and positions that are recognised as proper (Davies, 2011). Before something can be recognised as proper, however, it must be recognisable prior to this (Butler, 2017). One cannot engage in negotiations regarding the meaning of a young people’s truancy, say, without first making their absence recognisable as truancy. Butler (2017) argues that we need to pay attention to the support networks that enable certain storylines, positions, and acts to be repeated, easily recognisable, and therefore dominant at the expense of alternatives. For example, it may be easier to recognise the position of a lazy truant than it is to recognise the position of a young person who has fought with the school for a long time and now is now too exhausted to attend school. Importantly, negotiating a specific identity without support may leave one silenced and misunderstood, thereby doing violence to the person without recourse to a positive identity (Davies, 2011). It is with these subjective consequences in mind that it becomes important to explore what identities are recognisable for absent young people undergoing absence interventions. Below I explore how absent young people are recognisable as having different types of absence problems and how the support networks enable this recognisability pattern to dominate alternatives.

3. Method

The study is based on a participant observation and interview study that I conducted at a school in a large town in Denmark from fall 2018 to spring 2020. For anonymity reasons, I call the place Summerfield and the presented names are pseudonyms. Summerfield was a medium-sized school that serviced an area populated mostly by low to medium income families, many of these having an ethnic background different than Danish. My observations and interviews focused on young people in secondary school (7^th to 9^th grade, aged 12–15) whose amount of absence was above 10%, along with their teachers and other school personnel involved in dealing with absence from school. The 10% cut off was chosen based on the school’s practice of calling in students with more than 10% absence for an ‘absence meeting’, consisting of a 20-minute meeting between the student, their parents, a social worker, and the vice principal (I participated in 41 meetings). In this article, I focus on the conversations that these young people had with the adults in the hallway, during the home-school liaisons, and during ‘absence meetings.’ Home-school liaisons were held with teachers, parents, and students a few times a year to review the academic progress of the young people. I also conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with 13 of the above young people, 13 parents (6 mothers), 8 teachers, 2 social workers, and the vice principal. All participants consented individually to both interviews and participant observations, although parents provided additional consent for their children. All the interviews asked about the practice of responding to absence (for a full description, see Frydenlund, 2022). I used theoretically driven analysis rather than coding (Bøttcher et al., 2018; Packer, 2011), utilising positioning theory to explore what storylines the school staff used to frame their practice of responding to absence. Young people and their parents’ framing of absence are only pointed to as alternative points of view, without exploring them in depth. I used two main strategies to focus my analysis. First, I specifically looked at what position the absentee was given, alongside what meaning their absence had and which storyline was invoked in the practices of responding to absence – utilizing both observations and staff interviews. I then looked at how each of the responses also enabled the recognisability of a new type of absence problem, storyline, and absentee position, and how this matched the later responses. To identify support networks, I looked at the arguments and justifications that were given in responses to absence, paying particular attention to the places that these responses were challenged. The latter made it possible to raise the issues to the broader level of political and normative contexts. To qualify my analysis, I used researcher triangulation, consisting in colleagues reading parts of my raw material, discussing whether my interpretations were justified (Pedersen, 2012).

4. Results

Below follows a description of how absence becomes a problem and how the staff responded. I show that each response enables absence to be recognised as a new type of problem, leading to an escalation of intervention pressure. I argue that through repeated interventions the idea that school is ‘the proper path’ towards a good life becomes the dominant storyline. Within this storyline, young people were positioned as making a choice, thereby also being responsible for the choice they have made. Absence, as the story goes, is the wrong choice and regular school attendance is the non-negotiable right choice.

4.1. From legitimate to worrisome absence

In most cases when teachers noticed someone was absent or came in tardy, they would do nothing more than simply register them. This made sense within the storyline told by teachers: you could usually trust the pupils to have ‘good reasons’ for staying away, such as illness, vacations, or family emergencies. When someone wanted to ‘get away’ with absence, the young people knew how to make excuses that repeated this storyline, such as feigning illness. However, some absences did present as problems, and I was told that two things made the difference – often considered together. Firstly, a teacher would look at how often the young people was absent, and secondly, they would look at whether there were other signs that they were ‘off the proper path.’ These other signs were mostly related to proper conduct, such as not doing homework or being inattentive during class. While teachers sometimes responded to such absences, it was for the most part the two social workers Erik and Magnus’ responsibility, allowing the teachers to continue teaching. The social workers described their role in a way that is very similar to the helping interventions introduced above:

Me:‘What is your most important task in relation to the pupils?’

Erik the social worker: ‘In general? It’s about creating positive social relations to them so that I can work with them and help them to follow the proper path … to become good citizens.’

The social workers would often spend their mornings figuring out who was absent, looking at who came in late – ‘Is it the same children every day, or the same day [of the week] for a particular child?’ In this way they would figure out whose patterns of attendance may be in need of attention, or as Erik said: ‘they don’t need to come in late many times before I begin to take an interest in what is happening in their lives.’ Like the helping interventions above, the social workers were concerned with the issues that the young people had in their lives in general. Importantly, absence was mainly understood by both teachers and social workers through the lens of ‘worry’:

Me:‘What does the absence tell you?’

Magnus the social worker: ‘Well, it tells me … Like, a day now and again, that’s illness. But if I can find, if I can see that there are some children who, for example, have a Monday or Friday illness. Then that can be a sign of failure to thrive. Lack of care, lack of things in the home. So, it’s not only to, you know… It’s not only to correct or reprimand the children and saying, “come now, you need to go to school.” It’s also a question of going to their home, sniffing about to see what is happening at home. Is there something which isn’t as it’s supposed to be?’

Being positioned as ‘off the path’ indicated that a young person’s absence needed attention and correction, which made the young people recognisable as someone for whom one should worry. In the case of worry, absence was not necessarily the main issue. Rather, it was how well the young people thrived that was the main issue, and the main response was adult guidance, the effect of which relied on positive relationships.

Erik the social worker: ‘How do you then do that? Well, it’s difficult to put any formula to it… But it’s about being there for them and being an important adult [in their lives]. Show them that you care about them! […] Like, if I am just some random adult to them who is supposed to guide them, then I don’t really have the same influence, as when I have a close relationship with them.’

The staff at Summerfield considered relationship building with the young people as the most important tool for intervening in the lives of young people for whom they worried. Importantly however, such worries also led to an increased attention to a young people’s absence to monitor the effect of the help through the absence registry, mixing the desire to help the young people and the desire to make the young people attend school regularly. Both the teachers and the social workers emphasised this dual desire:

Me:‘What are you worried about?’

Benjamin the teacher: ‘Well, at the most basic level we want everyone to make it – to do well and have success after they leave school. There are several reasons for that: political attention for one, so that they don’t become an expense to society but pay income taxes later [we laugh]. And that’s fair, I mean, that’s what the pupils want as well. They have the same desires and dreams that we all do.’

So, absence can become worrisome and worth monitoring thanks to the storyline that attending school is the proper path towards goals presumed to be shared by everyone.

4.2. “Corridor conversations”

Many issues could be solved through informal ‘corridor conversations.’ These talks were held with young people who did not behave properly or who were sad for some reason, and the conversations took place as a ‘walk and talk,’ or sometimes as invitations to enter a separate room for a conversation. I did not gain access to these corridor conversations during my observation period because they were considered ‘too personal.’ The following is therefore based on interview accounts.

4.2.1. “Make the right choice!”

I was told that corridor conversations had three main functions: building a relationship, asking for information, and guiding the young people towards making right choices. Asking the young people for information means to ask them to account for their actions: to make themselves recognisable. The young people could then be judged according to the reasons presented and be presented with alternative ways of acting as a guidance:

Magnus the social worker: ‘some children they are able to handle it on their own. Then, for some children, they are in that zone where they are able to handle it on their own as well, but sometimes we need to guide them a bit or guide them in the right direction [my emphasis]. Take a corridor conversation, “what happened in the weekend,” and such. And then we have a group, fortunately not that large, where we are guiding them all the time.’

This guidance ensures that the young people were recognisable as having a choice: they could choose to do differently the next day. By making proper attendance a question of choice, it was thereby possible to hold the young people responsible for making the right choice (attendance). Indeed, the social workers told me that they would often repeat the mantra ‘make the right choices!’ Interestingly, the social workers told me that many of the young people’s reasons were related to other obligations, such as having responsibility for getting their siblings to kindergarten because their parents had to get up very early for work. Such a storyline proposes an alternative subject position for the young people, like a responsible subject making difficult choices. Yet, the staff told these young people that they could still choose to wake up earlier in the morning. When I inquired about why these obligations were not accepted, I was told by various staff members that proper attendance patterns were of the utmost importance because ‘if they do not learn it now, it will continue to haunt them into adult life.’ Such reasons silence the support network that would allow the young people to negotiate a positive position, leaving them only recognisable as making the wrong choices.

4.2.2. Say you are sorry or expect escalation

Once positioned as being ‘off the path,’ the young people needed to say sorry and show remorse to regain a positive position. The show of remorse during corridor conversations makes the young person recognisable as someone with a conscience taking responsibility. At other times, young people would plead illness. However, making such pleas would often lead the student to be recognisable as someone that should be monitored closely:

Magnus the social worker: ‘Well, I keep an eye on them. I don’t walk around noting everything down in a book, but… I know whom I am to keep an eye on. And at least two times a week, I check up on the absence registry. And with a small handful of pupils, I know: That girl, I need to stay attentive to her. She is always late, or she has a lot of sick days, and which kind of sick days are they, do they occur Monday and Friday, and stuff like that.’

The increased attention would sometimes consist in further registration practices besides the normal absence registration. This was especially the case for the young people who ‘always had an excuse,’ would leave during lessons, or who would leave early. Importantly, such responses of increased registration pave the way for young people to become recognisable as someone whose reasons might not be legitimate – no longer trusted automatically. This change is important because it positions a young person as a pupil who could be lying. When this was the case, the next response was to show the ‘consequences’ of absence:

Erik the social worker: ‘In the beginning I try to disrupt them, to present to them some reflections about what they can do. And then there is the educational readiness evaluation which hangs over their heads. And that can be used for good and bad – it’s not really my favourite thing, making threats and having them be motivated by something external, but it can sometimes be a means to get to them.’

The educational readiness evaluation had an important impact on the young people’s opportunities for further education, and absence was part of this evaluation. The evaluation enabled the staff to show the young people that their wrong choice of absence was having negative consequences, supporting the staff’s position by presenting politically sanctioned consequences. If such a show of consequences did not reduce the absence – ascertained by monitoring their absence and general conduct for a few weeks – the next step would be to call the parents in, which by itself was considered a ‘consequence.’

4.3. Calling in the parents: who is responsible?

Calling in parents as a response to absence served several purposes. First, it was done in the hope of creating a ‘shared front’ or ‘alliance’ between the school and the parents of the young people. It was assumed that when parents were called in, they would ‘have a conversation’ with their child and make the child see the error of their ways – hoping to ally the position of a ‘good son/daughter’ with the position of a ‘good pupil.’ Second, the call was meant to gather information about the family, seeking to find causes for the absence. Third, it was done to distinguish between whether the absence pattern was something known by the parents or not. When parents did not know about it, the problem of absence gained recognisability as a problem of truancy. In short, the aim was to find out if the family was responsible for the absence (a worrisome family) or whether the young people was (truancy). In both cases, absence remained the issue, maintained by the dominant storyline that school was the proper path.

4.3.1. Making families responsible for absence

One of the main types of interventions was ‘absence meetings.’ It was especially here that negotiations of the meaning of absence were attempted. Many of the young people who came in for a meeting had just above 10% absences, some of them due to unlucky illness periods. Several parents told me that they felt that the school was being too distrustful and that they did not like being made to look ‘suspicious.’ The meeting itself was considered by the parents as an inspection which thereby cast doubt about the parents’ own abilities to parent. To the young people, the meetings increased the gravity of the absence issue. It is one thing that your parents know about your absence. It is another when they are called in to meet with the vice principal. Indeed, many young people complained that being called to the vice principal’s office was taking their absence issue too seriously. To the staff, this was part of the intervention itself: making the young people realise the gravity of the issue. During such conversations, the negotiations could often take on the semblance of a fight about whose supportive network had the most authority: the school and its numbers on registered absences, the family, or the doctor’s office.

Hans’ mother: ‘But I can see there are some illegal absences that follow directly from legal absences. That’s strange because when I call him in sick, then the days after are also legal. We would like to have those deleted then.’

Christian the vice principal: ‘But it’s not only illness, it’s also tardiness. And he has got absences in each month.’

Hans’ mother:‘Yes, but we have also visited the doctor each month. But the doctor says it’s a virus and that we can’t do anything about it.’

Like before, regular school attendance is accepted as a choice, negotiating whether there were significant barriers to that choice. Christian can support his storyline of a possible truancy case – making it an issue of a wrong choice – by providing evidence based on quantity, extrapolating from the numbers what they could mean. However, Hans’ mother does not accept this storyline, instead indicating that the absences were all legal (and correct choices) by her own authority as the mother of the young people and later by appealing to the doctor. Yet, similar to how young people could claim absences to be legal, parents using such negotiation strategies too often could also become recognisable as making the wrong choices and doing their child a disservice:

Erik the social worker: ‘Many of our parents have misunderstood what care for their children means. They may think “Ooh my little baby, if you are feeling ill, you should stay at home today.” And we hope to change that as well. I mean, of course you have to stay at home when you are ill, or if you for some reason are having a bad day, right? But … it should happen within limits. And there are some who fuss too much about it.’

Parents attempting to negotiate risked making absence recognisable as a family issue wherein the parents did not take responsibility for their child’s life, shifting the focus onto the parents. Another aspect being negotiated was who knew the young people best. For example, the parents could be positioned as gullible, believing the young people’s lies, something the school staff was able to see through.

During these absence meetings, the vice principal and the social worker would often start giving advice to the parents about getting young people to bed early, shutting down their iPad, making them eat vitamin C, do sports, and setting the alarm clock earlier. In the case of worrisome families, they would also insinuate that perhaps they were ‘a bit too easy on the child.’ By offering advice like this, they provided an alternative for the parents, implying that the choices the parents were currently making were improper and should be changed. Among the things supporting such positioning were ideas about how parents from Summerfield differed from ‘normal,’ Danish ones.

Me: I’ve noticed that your advice is often quite pragmatic and simple, at least when you talk to the parents: like ‘shut down the iPad before going to bed.’

Erik the social worker: ‘Yes, many of our families have a bit of a different family pattern and perhaps there have their children at home a bit more [than usual]. I don’t think they have the same control and structure on their… Nah, maybe that’s a bit prejudiced. But their family life, it’s probably built in a different way sometimes, right? And maybe there’s a big sister who is putting a little sister to bed. So yes, sometimes it’s a bit simple, something that is a matter of course to a normal, Danish family that maybe isn’t a part of their family pattern. Sometimes you’re maybe left a bit on your own or with your bigger siblings. So sometimes it’s the simple things that can help make a change.’

It is in this context that giving ‘simple’ advice could be considered help by the staff, while other obligations that the young people and family claimed to have could become recognisable as problematic. In response, some parents argued that they had of course already tried such ‘simple’ solutions and seemed, at least to me, quite offended by the advice. Indeed, this sort of advice and pressure to make parents ‘stop fussing’ could sometimes lead to conflict between the school and the parents. A few times, this even led the parents to pull their child from the school. The vice principal told me that he was somewhat ambivalent about this because on the one hand he thought that Summerfield was the best place to help young people, yet on the other hand, the young people would no longer be a problem in the statistics. This once again shows political support for the main issue being one of attendance rather than, say, the schools’ prejudices and flexibility with regards to alternative family patterns. Generally, however, most parents I talked to considered the school the proper authority, believing it important to listen to the school even when they did not agree with them. This belief, the parents told me, originated from how they themselves had been in schools where the school’s authority was non-negotiable and where punishments would follow anyone who dared question it. Support for the storyline that school was the non-negotiable proper choice was thereby also supported by the lack of resistance from the parents.

Interestingly, the vice principal reflected on alternatives to this storyline of absence being the fault of either the young people or the parents. He said that sometimes the school was the issue and that self-reflection was required, such as if the school was a bad learning environment. However, he knew that Summerfield was performing better than expected in the statistics. The storylines of ‘ethnic, non-normal families’ who were not expected to perform well, and Summerfield as a well performing school, together supported the context that school was the proper path to a good life and that attending Summerfield was an exceptionally good path.

4.3.2. Pressuring young people to take responsibility for their absence

When parents were not aware of their child’s absence, the issue was recognised as truancy. To the social workers, truancy was recognisable as a bigger problem than other types of absence because when the young people would hide their absence, the social workers were not able to help: ‘You can’t help when you don’t know that there’s a problem.’ This contrasts to how the young people recognised this practice: When they were asked about their peers’ absence, they would not ‘snitch’ on them. Despite the best intentions of being worried about pupils and wanting to help them, the practice of checking up on pupils and calling their parents inherently involved a great deal of sorting lies from truths, leading to suspicion rather than worry. Based on this suspicion, two positions were available:

Erik the social worker: ‘Some pupils feign going to school. Maybe they take a walk in the area, and when their parents leave home they return to it. Sleeping, watching Netflix, PlayStation, it’s a lot of that. But we also have a few who can’t be at home because several of our parents don’t have a job and then they simply walk around the area. There they probably find others from other schools who are challenged in the same way and with whom they then have a sense of community.’

The first position available would be the young people who simply made the wrong choice and could be asked to ‘pull themselves together.’ This storyline was supported by psychology, with the vice principal calling it ‘a case of the marshmallow experiment,’ the experiment checking whether children could keep themselves from eating a marshmallow placed in front of them when they were told that they would get a lot of marshmallows if they did so (Mischel, 2014). The lazy young people who would go home instead of returning to school were considered to be young people who did not exercise enough self-control. Regarding the second position, a greater danger was looming: the young people could be on the path towards a criminal career. This storyline was supported by stories of the area having criminal groups who might be ‘in search of fresh blood,’ as well as the generally accepted storyline that absence is related to crime (Frydenlund, 2021). These young people were considered lazy as well but were further recognisable as ‘off the proper path.’ Both positions had additional support from the fact that the school was responsible for ensuring the safety of the young people and from the trust that the parents had in the school to ensure this safety. If parents could no longer trust that their child was safe and doing well in school, then there was a problem. In short, there was an interconnected network of support for the act of truancy being recognisable as a bigger problem than other types of absence.

The intervention used against truancy was to confront the pupils with their lies and once again show them the consequences of their bad choices.

Prior to the following exchange, I was told that Sophie, a young person, had visited another school yesterday and had been absent from several lessons. During the home-school liaison, she was confronted with this.

Erik the social worker: “Sometimes, Sophie, you leave school, and you tell me that Agnes [teacher] gave you permission. But when I speak to Agnes, she denies this. And then there was this episode yesterday where you were gone – where were you?

Sophie: ‘I went to the bathroom’

Christian the vice principal: ‘I’ve received a message from Winterset School, so I know where you were yesterday.’

Sophie: ‘No, I went to the bathroom!’

Erik: “For 4 hours? Listen to yourself – can’t you hear it’s a bit too much?”

Sophie In a low voice: ‘That’s normal for me.’

Erik gives Sophie a chance to come clean, yet when she does not take it, she is then confronted with her lying. Sophie loses all opportunity to be seen as a young person who has acted based on good reasons, and instead she has become a troublesome, suspicious, or lying young person. In this sense, truancy is a double transgression because it consists of two wrong choices: not attending regularly and lying about it. Both transgressions have to be atoned for before the issue can be let go:

Me: ‘It almost seems as if it’s sometimes worse if they lie about why they were absent’

Erik the social worker: ‘[…] To stand there and lie about it afterwards, then I get a bit … At this point you got to lie down and say, “all right, I’ve been caught red handed, that was perhaps a bit stupid but so on and so forth.” So yeah, I can get a bit … Yes.’

Like previously, help and guidance can be provided to those who accept that they have made a mistake. Without such an admission, however, help would be no good.

4.4. Heavy cases

A few young people at Summerfield were recognised as ‘heavy cases.’ The term was generally used to refer to young people who had complicated problems that the staff did not know how to deal with – often including misconduct such as lying about their absence, mental issues, and very high absence numbers. It was these heavy cases that were met most explicitly with the storyline that school was the proper and only path to a good life, especially during absence meetings:

Christian the vice principal: ‘Ahmed, to be a good pupil you need to work. It’s okay, we’re all tired some days, and then you can work 75%, raise your hand when you know the answer. And other days you have a lot of energy when you know the answer to everything. Ahmed, it’s you who can do something … . You are happy about going to the club, right? (Ahmed nods). And your mother says that if you don’t start coming to school more often, she will pull you from the club. You need to do something to stay. So, what do you think?’

Ahmed, looking down: ‘Yes.’

Christian: ‘Who is it that can do something?’

Ahmed: ‘Myself … ’

Christian: ‘Is it your mother who goes to school?’

Ahmed: ‘I … ’

Christian: ‘We want to help, but we can’t if you won’t tell us anything.’

Ahmed is given little opportunity to negotiate the meaning of his absence. He is positioned as making the wrong choices by being presented possible, negative consequences for his behaviour. Furthermore, he cannot negotiate his position, pleading help, because Christian presents the choice as easy: simply raise your hand when you know the answer. During other meetings, Christian would often find further support for this storyline by comparing school to jobs: ‘if your parents were absent this much from work, they would be fired.’ Furthermore, he would use the new law that enabled the municipality to pull child-support from parents whose illegal absence was above 15%. Another possibility was to suggest a change of school, which was always discussed during ‘heavy cases.’ Once alternative placement was discussed and planned, this had important implications for any further relationship building. The staff would begin slackening the pressure towards the child because soon it would no longer be their responsibility. While this sometimes left the young people to drift more away from school, the slackened pressure – or flexibility – also led some young people to gain a better relationship with the teachers.

However, even in such cases, the young people had gotten so far off the proper path that it was difficult for them to regain recognisability as someone who was on their way back onto that path. The following example shows how the staff responded to what I considered one of Amira’s attempts at making amends, trying to come back to school:

Amira was deemed a heavy case and would be moving to another school. During the event below, she had not taken part in almost any lessons for the last three months, although she had been present at school – often sleeping in the library. This led several teachers to discuss how she was a bad influence on some of the good kids because she disrupted their group work or made them truant with her.

I am sitting in a room full of quiet pupils, getting ready for a written exam which is important to their yearly grades. There are only a few minutes till the exam begins when Amira knocks quietly on the door. Agnes quietly goes to the door, opens it up slightly and whispers out to Amira something that I cannot make out. Amira says that she wants to be part of the exam and asks to borrow a computer because hers does not have any power left. Agnes shakes her head, sending her away, saying that she cannot enter an exam this late if she has not prepared. The same day, I ask Agnes about why she did not let Amira join the exam:

Agnes: “I actually spoke to her [Amira] afterwards and she did tell me that she had really wanted to take part. But, like, lacking a computer and then arriving with only two minutes left before the exam was about to start, then she didn’t really want to.”

Amira’s position as a heavy case – as someone whom one could not help – seemed to make her unable to gather enough support to become recognisable as a pupil seeking to make amends and return to the proper path. Like Ahmed above, she no longer had any room to negotiate her position to a positive one. Interestingly, there was an alternative understanding available to the staff: ‘heavy cases,’ as young people who were living difficult lives, struggling with more issues that any young people should. Yet even as the staff could understand the young people’s difficulties, it did not change the staff’s response to absence, since school was the path to a good life:

Me: ‘Can it sometimes be the right choice to truant?’

Magnus the social worker: ‘It can be the only choice. If it’s the right one? I can only really say no to that. I mean, of course it’s not the right choice to truant. But it can be the only one. Yes, that’s what it can be … ’

In the end, the dominant storyline of the school as the proper path to a good life was non-negotiable. All other alternative storylines, positions, and meanings of absence were left unsupported and silenced. This meant that while young people were positioned as having a choice, they were simultaneously robbed of all alternatives, leaving them with all the responsibility but no alternative paths to choose from.

5. Discussion

The staff at Summerfield cared greatly about their pupils’ learning and well-being. Yet, within the normative context of school being the proper path and only correct choice, it was precisely their caring that led their initial helping interventions escalate into pressuring interventions. Because help could not begin, before the young people returned to school. Especially the young people whose general conduct was outside the norm or could not be recognised as being inside the norm were targeted by pressure.

The introduction of positioning theory allows for an analysis of how help isn’t neutral but has significant effects on what meanings of absence become available. Future research ought to pay more attention to these meanings, as the current study suggests that helping interventions risk repeating, rather than challenging the idea that absence is the proper target of intervention. Furthermore, the notion of subjectivity allows me to theorise that this has exclusionary effects. The escalation of pressure gradually left the young people without support for a positive pupil identity because they were unable to be recognisable as making reasonable choices. In this sense, the rising pressure took part in excluding the young people from positive school identities, pushing them away from school.

The notion of recognisability helped me theorise the above interventions as a connected process – keeping the normative context alive by repetition. The notion of support network further enabled me to theorise this not as a set of individual feats, but rather as acts supported by multiple people acting both at the school and elsewhere (Butler, 2017). This made me look beyond the single acts of the staff and turn my analytical attention to how they connected to policies and ideas that reach far beyond the control of the staff and the school I studied. Based on this, I suggest the following:

Compulsory school laws (and norms) make it natural and legitimate for ‘helpers’ to predefine the goal of the help, without speaking to the helped first. This is part of the support network that enabled Summerfield to always aim for the reduction of absence. Indeed, we saw that whenever negotiation was attempted, there was a risk of becoming recognisable as being even more of a problem. Without any normative and political flexibility with regards to absence, helping interventions risk escalating into pressuring interventions. A predefined goal seems, in fact, counter-productive to the main method of helping interventions: building positive relationships based on mutual understanding, aiming to help young people deal with the issues that lead to absence. Indeed, when the staff had given up on heavy cases, the reduction in pressure also seemed to give better room for creating positive relationships again.

Some of my observations hint at the possibility that this escalation of pressure targets young people unequally. For example, the staff framed the parents as from non-Danish origins to lend support to the idea of them needing guidance, and the recent law of regulating absence through fines was first introduced as part of the ‘no ghettoes in 2030’ act aimed specifically at ethnic minority parents (Regeringen, 2018). While this is not yet definitive evidence of inequality in response, other studies support the idea that it is worth exploring in more detail the relationship between ethnic minority status and the meaning of absence (see for example Yang & Ham, 2017). I therefore recommend further study of discrepancies in responses to absence, with specific focus on who receives which type of intervention, the consequences thereof, and what supports it.

Lastly, we may still think that some forms of pressure are indeed helpful, even if those helped do not recognise it. After all, most young people occasionally dislike going to school and sometimes consider it boring, so we pressure them because we believe we know better. However, this study opens the possibility for a more nuanced discussion. It invites us to ask whether our helping interventions may be doing more harm to the young people than what can be justified by the potential benefits gained from the young people returning to school.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank everyone at Summerfield who made the study possible. I also thank my wife and my colleagues for reading and commenting my drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonas Højgaard Frydenlund

Jonas Højgaard Frydenlund graduated with a master’s degree in psychology January 2018, his final project being about young people’ reasons for absence in the context of their own lives. In May 2022, he defended his Ph.D. thesis, utilizing participant observation and interviews to explore how certain meanings of absence from school come to dominate the handling of absence. He currently works at the University of Agder in Norway focusing on the psychological and social health of young people.