Why children say bunking off school is cool
More fun and less pressure are what youngsters want, reports Judith Judd
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Your support makes all the difference.BUNKING off is cool. That's why Lily and Lucy started. And once they had started, they found they couldn't stop.
Lily, who is 16, has not attended school regularly since she was 11. "It's the peer pressure thing. We started bunking off a lesson in the toilets for a laugh. Then you do it for a day, a week, a month.
"The first time I bunked off, for three days no one noticed. School is boring. The excitement of bunking is that you might get caught. Sometimes you want to be caught."
She forged sickness notes from her parents and hung about in friends' houses, burger bars and Oxford Street shops. She isn't anti-education, just anti-school. Now she has a home tutor and is studying for GCSEs and planning to go to college.
Lucy, who attends an all-girls school, did not start truanting until she was 12. "People kept saying to me why don't you bunk off. So I did. Then I kept missing things and it's hard to go back because you have to go back. The others look down on you."
Michelle, 15, also feels she is trapped in a pattern she cannot break. "Teachers should be more understanding. We are doing Macbeth and I keep missing bits so I get confused. The teacher just says, you don't come to school, why should I bother with you?"
Sometimes she gets as far as the bus-stop in the morning but no further.
For Jack, aged 13, it was not peer pressure but bullying which led to two months' truanting. He told his parents he was going to schools each day then hung about in Camden Town. Unlike another panel member, who was beaten up in his first week by sixth-formers, he was not physically attacked, but his classmates made racist comments.
A social worker found him roaming the streets and he has now been back at school for a month. He doesn't know why, but the racist taunts have stopped.
So what will be they be telling the Prime Minister? Most wish someone had tried harder to keep them in school. "Schools should be harder places to escape from," says Lily.
"There should be more social workers to help people back," says Jack.
"There should be less pressure," says Serra, aged 14. "It's the pressure of having to get up in the morning. It's the pressure of teachers not letting you go at your own speed and piling on the work. It would be better to do fewer GCSEs."
Hollie, 12, says: "Teachers should make lessons more fun and interesting instead of just telling us to copy things down in a book."
Michael, aged 14, says: "Teachers should be more friendly. They shout at you about missing lessons and that makes you dislike them more."
He is not worried about leaving school without qualifications. He intends to be a black cab driver like several of his relations.
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