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| Ms Stephanie Rollings. |
When truancy becomes a habit, students are in danger of sliding into delinquency or becoming unhappy loners – not to mention losing educational opportunities. But while truancy rates could be as high as 20 per cent in some areas, little has been done to help students and their parents overcome the problem.
Monash University's Centre for Developmental Psychiatry is developing a ground-breaking program that uses behavioural intervention to get students back to school.
Psychologist Stephanie Rollings is project coordinator of Promoting Attendance and School Success (PASS), a joint program between Monash University, Monash Medical Centre and Maroondah Hospital. Funded by a National Health and Medical Research Council grant, PASS is for students aged between seven and 14 and also involves their parents and schools.
The 12-week program consists of 12 one-hour sessions in which the student sees a psychologist. A different psychologist also works with the parents or caregivers in 12 sessions, while school staff are given three one-hour consultations as well as telephone contact.
Truancy should not be confused with school refusal, another area Ms Rollings has studied. Put simply, truancy occurs when a student goes off to school in the morning – but doesn't arrive there. Students might hang out with their mates, without the knowledge of parents. School refusal occurs when the child is over-anxious and stays home, with the parent's knowledge. Ms Rollings has also coordinated a school refusal clinic in the past.
Participants in PASS are referred by their school or their parents. The reasons students become truants are complex and there is no typical truant. Truancy can be due to academic pressure, learning difficulties, or relationship conflicts at home or at school.
Ms Rollings says PASS takes a team-based approach and gives students and parents practical life skills, such as communication and anger management techniques, as well as goal setting and cognitive therapy - getting students to recognise their 'self-talk' and make it positive.
Parents are encouraged to adopt positive attitudes to school, make morning routines smoother and ensure their children actually get to school. The young people and their parents work together in some sessions to improve communication, and the students may negotiate their own contracts for attending school.
Ms Rollings says schools have been very supportive in encouraging the students to attend, even changing curriculums where needed.
Since the program began in mid-1997, 35 students have participated. Many now regularly attend school, some have left for TAFE or employment programs and only a few have dropped out of the program. The best measure of success so far, says Ms Rollings, is that most are enjoying happier family relationships.
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For the second half of 1998, Jonathan Sofoulis wasn't going to school at all. This year, after completing the PASS program, Jonathan, 15, attends school every day, to repeat Year 8. The bus ride to Monash Secondary College represents the end of a long journey that began when Jonathan first skipped school at the end of Grade 6.
Since then, his parents, Shirley and Milton Sofoulis, have sought advice from school staff, social workers, even the police. Jonathan had individual counselling and attended a special school for students with social adjustment difficulties before enrolling at a regular high school, when the problem recurred. In 1998, he gradually stopped going to school altogether. A school social worker put his parents in touch with the PASS program. Getting Jonathan to attend the program was the next challenge – he skipped the first session, but went to the next. Why? "I was getting bored at home," he says. Jonathan's truancy fell outside the usual definition – his parents knew where he was because he simply stayed home. But the more his parents pushed him to go to school, the harder he dug in. Jonathan says his school work got too much for him. He liked English but found maths and science particularly difficult and he didn't feel the teachers were helping him much. As well, he was being hassled by some class mates. Jonathan found his original high school too large – his mother, Shirley, says staff initially hadn’t even realised that Jonathan was truant – and he now attends Monash Secondary College, which has only 300 students. This was one of the changes suggested by PASS counsellors. Another was the program’s goal-setting which Jonathan found helpful. He knew he enjoyed being creative and he considered training to become a chef. He also related well to his counsellor, a young psychologist. PASS encouraged the Sofoulis family to look at how they could start having fun together again and how to give Jonathan more credit for being older, even if it was something as simple as being allowed to watch an M-rated video that his siblings were too young to view. Mrs Sofoulis says PASS came along when Jonathan was mature enough to benefit from it and its strength was in making them look at the issue through Jonathan's perspective. She says that as a family they are closer, and looking back, she realises how far they have come together: "We really have made incredible changes." - Kay Ansell |
| For more information about the PASS program, call Monash Medical Centre's Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service on (03) 9594 1300. |
