Guzmán Robador | Alicante (EFE).- Absenteeism in the classroom can arise at any time during a student’s educational stage, not only at the Secondary level, and is a warning sign of a possible abandonment of studies at a later stage, a problem that continues to be a pending issue in the family and teaching environment, despite the important pedagogical advances.
Truancy is a global problem. Since the appearance of the first school, there are always students who have not wanted to go”, said, in an interview with EFE, Professor Carolina Gonzálvez, attached to the Department of Evolutionary and Didactic Psychology of the University of Alicante (UA), who leads an Erasmus+ project for the creation of a School Attendance Observatory.
SOS-Attendance Observatory
Four universities -Alicante, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, University of Messina and Ataturk University- and eight secondary schools in Spain, Belgium, Italy and Turkey are participating in this three-year project, called the SOS-Attendance Observatory, whose team of work is characterized by being an interdisciplinary group made up of researchers and professionals from education, educational psychology, clinical psychology and sociology.
“We want to investigate truancy, its causes, because it is influenced by many variables, the family context, the school and the environment in which the student develops. We also intend to detect the training needs that families and teachers need to address this problem, the cause of which is not only the student”, explained Gonzálvez.
He specified that the project initially focuses on the Secondary education level and has revealed that the choice of countries involved in this initiative “is not random”, given that those located in southern Europe register a higher absenteeism rate than that of the northern nations.
online training courses
Based on the collection of these data and demands, the promoters of the project will offer online training courses for teachers and parents both in the centers and on a platform that will be enabled on the SOS-Attendance Observatory website, which will also be open to anyone interested in knowing how to act when faced with school absenteeism.
“It goes beyond being a traditional observatory, because we are already doing field work, going to educational centers where students fill out surveys. But we want it not to stop there, but for them to participate in a contest that we are going to do with photographs, infographics or posters with a message focused on preventing absenteeism and highlighting the good things about attending high school”, the expert has advanced.
To these lines of action will be added the development of awareness campaigns to encourage school attendance of all students, with special attention to people with fewer opportunities.
Refusal from school at any educational stage
“In this project we work with adolescents -each of the four countries will provide a minimum representative sample of 1,500 students-, but in the future we would like to do it from earlier levels, because the rejection of school can arise at any time during the educational stage” , even in Infant and Primary, he has stated.
A stumbling block that professionals in Spain face is not being able to access state data on school absenteeism, unlike other countries, according to Gonzálvez.
“Yes, the figures on early educational dropout are published, and are available to us, an issue that refers to a different problem: students between the ages of 18 and 24 who do not continue their compulsory or post-compulsory studies,” he stated. However, many times, these young people who leave the books may have previously had problems with truancy, she has indicated.
The necessary prevention
“For this reason, we are interested in knowing the rates of school absenteeism to reduce early educational dropouts”, because it is “necessary to redirect the focus of attention towards prevention”, stressed this teacher, who has also advocated applying “didactic methodologies innovative” that encourage the student to attend class and improve teacher training to emotionally care for the student.
Gonzálvez has opined that the protocols against school absenteeism in schools are useful, although he has deemed it convenient, on certain occasions, to carry out a continuous evaluation system to determine their quality (whether or not they work effectively).
Within the framework of the project for the creation of a school attendance observatory, the UA works with rural and urban educational centers and with different socioeconomic conditions in the Valencian Community and the Region of Murcia, although it also has contacts with others in Andalusia, which , in his opinion, can be considered a variable and representative sample at the national level.