This article discusses aspects of school attendance difficulties, focusing on why a minority of children decide to miss school. It is an exploratory study representing a developmental approach that aims to establish the immediate determinants of school absence to gain more understanding of the nature of attendance difficulties and eventually inform practitioner methods. Questionnaires, designed to measure attitudes, perceptions and parent-child interaction over school absence were administered to two hundred and nine 12-13 year olds attending a comprehensive school. Thirty-five individual interviews were carried out with good and poor attenders to clarify the questionnaire responses. It was concluded that school attendance difficulties develop like other defiant behaviour problems, with parental reaction playing a major role. Government policies encouraging the use of punitive measures with parents of poor attenders do not provide practitioners or pastoral staff with the sophisticated working methods necessary to help poor attending children achieve an education.

Because of established links with attainment, the UK government has, over the last ten years, developed policies to improve school attendance. Legislation now makes school attendance a parental responsibility. In the small-scale study reported in this article, Anne Sheppard, manager of an Education Welfare Service Team in North Yorkshire, collected data on 57 pupils' attitudes to school and schoolwork and their perceptions of their parents' involvement in their education. In order to examine the role of these variables in relation to school attendance, 'good' and 'poor' attenders of 12 to 13 years of age, matched for ability, were compared on a number of quantifiable measures regarding their perceptions of schoolwork and their parents' behaviour in relation to aspects of their schooling. Both good and poor attenders avoided class work if possible, but good attenders were more likely to do their homework and perceived their parents as more involved in their education. Anne Sheppard argues that Education Social Welfare Services need to take account of findings from parental involvement research in their practice if they are to increase both children's school attendance and attainment.

The UK government has encouraged schools and local authorities to promote school attendance because of its associations with academic attainment and antisocial behaviour. Legislation makes school attendance a parental responsibility. This small-scale study collected data on parent-child interaction immediately prior to school absence to examine how such interaction influenced the development of attendance difficulties. Good and poor school attenders, of 12-13 years of age, were compared on quantifiable measures of their self-reported requests to be absent from school, their perceived parents' responses, self-reported whole-day and lesson truancy, and expected parental reaction to truancy. School absence requests were significantly more frequent among the poor attenders, who gained more absence and whose parents were inconsistent in their responses to the requests. Education social work/welfare services and school pastoral staff need wellformulated methods, backed by empirical research, if they are to work effectively with parents and young people and substantially raise their low attendance.

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