Truancy Call – ‘Dear parent, ur child is bunking off’

Published: 03 June 2010
by JOSIE HINTON

A TEXT-A-TRUANT ser­vice designed to catch teenagers bunking off from school by messaging their parents has been credited with improving attendance at two Camden schools.

The system, called Truancy Call, automatically sends a text message or a recorded voicemail to parents if their child is not present at morning registration.

Storing up to five numbers for each parent, it then continues to send messages on the hour until 8pm, until the child turns up or a reason is provided for their absence.

The technology has so far been introduced at Hampstead School in West Hampstead, and at William Ellis in Highgate, where it has been celebrated as a resounding success – and now could be rolled out to all of the borough’s secondary schools.

“The first day we introduced it we had six parents in school within half an hour wanting to know where their children were,” said Robbie Cathcart, headteacher of William Ellis, where attendance figures have improved by 3 per cent since last year.

“The thing about it is that boys don’t want their parents to know they are late, so that’s the biggest deterrent from our point of view. In the majority of cases the parents have just forgotten to report their child’s absence, but it also allows us to pick up on any boys who have problems coming into school and address that.”

Linking directly to 

schools’ computerised registration systems, parents can simply text back or speak a reason for their child’s absence into an answer machine, to stop them clogging up school phonelines.

Louisa Williams, deputy headteacher at Hampstead School, decided to invest in the technology last month after a six-month trial during which attendance improved by 2 per cent.

She said: “The system works by allowing parents to support us by letting us know if children are not going directly to school. 

“Along with other measures, it has meant attendance is the best it has ever been and we now have an extra 30 students in school learning every day.”

New government figures released on Wednesday show an average absence figure of 6.5 per cent across Camden compared to 6 per cent at William Ellis and 5 per cent at Hampstead School.