This study is an interview-based investigation of 15 students with unexcused absences in the last school year in Swedish compulsory school. The aim is to explore students' descriptive perspectives on truancy, school life and their own futures. The interviews are analysed as presentations of accounts within symbolic interaction. The students account a variety of excuses or justifications, including internal justifications, such as 'I didn't understand', and external justifications, such as 'My dad is sick'. Examples of motivations for truancy include boredom (justifying internal excuses) and bullying (justifying external excuses). Most of the excuses seem to connect to the school atmosphere. All students except one indicate that they dislike school and all students except three have relationship problems with peers and teachers. These three students display a change or 'turning point' from truant behaviour to continual school attendance and from exclusion to inclusion.

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The aim of this paper is to explore how school staff members involved in Student Health and Welfare conferences reflect on individual students with high levels of truancy based on their personal relationships. Using positioning analysis, the transcriptions of 15 interviews with staff were analysed. The school staff's reflections on the individual students covered three areas: health, social well-being and education. The results show the ways in which positions were shaped and illustrate a reflexive process that developed continually throughout the staff's relationships with the students. The staff positioned the students and indicated attributions of the students; however, the attributions were predominately negative. With each position, the staff's view of students as subjects or objects and their relationships to the students are described in terms of mutual or one-way dialogue.