A crackdown on truants on the Buttershaw estate saw dozens rounded up by police in only a few days. The blitz was set up jointly by the police, Buttershaw Upper School and education social workers with powers given to them under new legislation. Ten Bradford schools are named in the worst 200 in the country for unauthorised absence. Jan Winter reports on the anti-truancy drive and how Bradford is battling with the problem of truancy.

IT'S A COLD, wet weekday but there are still any number of youngsters wandering around the Buttershaw estate, hoods up against the weather.

After two days of Odsal police's clampdown on truants, most teenagers are reaching into their pockets for the passes which show they are legitimately out of school as they see the police van approach.

PCs Nick Mosey and Paul Broadbent, of the division's community safety unit, were surprised at how close to school the truants were when they were picked up.

"The majority have been within 500 yards of the school. They're bunking off lessons or teachers they don't like. They just walk straight back into school later and haven't had far to travel," said PC Mosey.

"Persistent offenders have somewhere to go out of sight where they stay. It's difficult to know what to do with the persistent truant. Most are at home, or they go into the city centre.

"Most of the truants we've picked up are in groups, a few are on their own but most are in small groups. We've also found either groups of girls or groups of boys, not mixed groups of truants."

Two lads close to the gates of Buttershaw Upper grin as the van pulls up opposite them. There are a lot of mock exams in school that day and the youngsters have passes which they happily show to the officers.

As PC Mosey talks to the boys on the pavement, another youngster hurries past with his hood up. PC Broadbent is quickly out of the van, calling "Excuse me, fella!" to the boy's departing back. Although he goes to a different school and does not have a pass, PC Broadbent is happy with the lad's explanation, thanks him and lets him go.

The police's community safety action team was spurred on to take out what it believed to be the country's first truancy order after complaints about schoolchildren causing trouble in Wibsey Park, not far from Buttershaw Upper School. The team received 27 telephone calls about problems in November, almost a third of them relating to schoolchildren causing a nuisance in the park.

The truancy order has been made possible by the Crime and Disorder Act, which came into force earlier this year, allowing a senior police officer and head of an area's education service to agree the geographical area of the order and a designated place where truants can be taken to meet up with education social workers.

During the campaign, some youngsters had run away from officers, or clung on to railings refusing to go into the police van. Sergeant Adrian Denby, team leader at Odsal's community safety action team, said: "At the end of the day we're interested in the child's welfare, that's what we're doing. We give up if they look as if they're going to run across a main road or something, we just let them go. We're there to help them."

Of the dozens of truants picked up during the blitz, about one third were youngsters who had already been identified by the school as persistent non-attenders. These were taken straight to nearby Sedbergh youth club - the place designated under the truancy order - where education social workers were waiting to talk to the young people, involve parents and the school in starting a plan to get youngsters back into class.

As PCs Mosey and Broadbent drove around a narrow street on the estate they spotted a girl, on her own. Immaculately dressed, she told them she had overslept and was on her way to school.

In the van, out of the rain, her name was checked against the list of persistent truanters - it wasn't there but PC Mosey recognised her.

"Didn't I pick you up last week?" he asked, and she agreed that she had overslept then as well.

The previous week, because she was not a known truant, she was taken back to school where her mum had been involved. But this time - a second time caught outside school during classtime - the Year Ten pupil was taken to Sedbergh youth centre. "What, for oversleeping?" she said, looking upset but resigned to the situation. There, an education social worker welcomed her in and took her into a room to start the process of tackling the truanting.

In total, during a four-day blitz, the police identified 35 truants - and had no complaints about problems in the parks usually frequented by youngsters skipping school.

Parents pose problem by condoning bunking off

With a truancy record of some of the worst figures in the country for non-attendance in upper schools, Bradford has a mountain to climb in tackling the problem.

And Gabrielle Hall, one of the district's two principal education social workers, said the district had a particular problem with parents allowing their children to stay off school.

"What truancy really means is children who check into school and then push off.

"But parentally-condoned absence is a big problem in Bradford. They know their children are at home. We have to make school more accessible so parents can talk about difficulties and make connections for parents that their children aren't going to achieve if they're not in school."

Truancy should not be the socially-acceptable thing which it has become in Bradford, she said, where youngsters had a dental appointment at 10am and had the rest of the day off.

"When you go into town you see kids with their parents out of school and I'm tempted to ask them what they're doing.

"There's also a problem of holidays during term-time. The expectation has to be that kids are in school during term or they won't achieve.

"If parents have had a rough ride themselves at school and not had a happy school career and have dropped out, it's harder for them. It's hard to get up the courage to go through the doors and make an appointment with the head to talk about their children's problems."

There was a worry that youngsters who were out of school during classtimes were more at risk of getting into crime or drugs, too.

Fellow principal education social worker Jane Butler said it was crucial to make the link for pupils and parents that if youngsters don't attend school as often as they can, they won't achieve what they should.

"Putting that message across to parents is a key, we try to make that a theme," she said.

The truancy order pilot scheme had meant education social workers had met youngsters face-to-face at a time when they were skipping school.

"One of the important things is that we don't do this in isolation. We try to do some follow-up in the school on these young people to try to make a lasting impact on their attendance.

"We may come across some young people who it may be first or second time they have truanted and we try to get them back into school and get the school to deal with it and link back through with the parents."

Ten of the district's schools are in the bottom 200 in the country for non-attendance, calculated by the percentage of half-days missed because of unauthorised absence.

Eccleshill Upper School, at one time the worst school in the country for truanting, has an unauthorised absence rate of 9.7 per cent. Bradford as a whole has an absence rate of 3.1 per cent, but Bowling Community College and Carlton Bolling have a rate of 6.9 per cent, and Buttershaw Upper School has a 6.9 per cent unauthorised attendance rate, and Greenhead Grammar School in Keighley has a rate at 4.4 per cent.

Elsewhere in the region, Leeds's average figure is 1.9 per cent, Kirklees's is 1.5 per cent and Calderdale's is only 0.7 per cent.

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