The Effect Of Truancy On The Academic Performance Of Senior Secondary School Students
[A CASE STUDY OF OGBOMOSO SOUTH, OYO STATE]

Schofield (2005) says there is much that the parents can do to make school the enjoyable, satisfying, valuable experience that it should be for all children. One of the most important of these is to show an attitude of interest, cooperation and appreciation of the school and the teachers.
    Another thing is to show interest in the child’s progress, activities and accomplishment’s in the school. This should not be a prying interest, appearing to check up on the child and police his school behaviour. It can be an interesting, encouraging attitude which brings his two worlds, home and school into one orbit and makes it natural for child to share his school experiences because he knows his prents are both interested and sympathetically understanding of his successes and failures, his progress and his difficulties. This would make him develop positive attitude to schooling.
    Frances (2009) says that children who behave badly more often need help rather than punishment. The set limits, however should be adhered to. If punishment is needed, it should be given, but the child must  understand why is being punished and must be shown when it has been given that the relationship is as it was before.
    Durojaye (2007) says that parents and teachers play very important role in moulding up students, especially when it comes to eradicating truancy. He is of the opinion that parents and teachers are the most important influence during the crucial period in a child’s life. Parents start the process of education, teachers continue it. It is therefore absolutely necessary that both the architects and the builders of the child’s educational development cooperate to achieve the formation of a responsible and well adjusted human being. To what extent the child’s intellectual potentialities for success in the educative process can be realized, depends initially upon how the parents’ who transmitted this potentiality can provide the environmental influence to nurture it. 
    He also says that parent-teacher co-operation is necessary if the child is to have a coherent and consistent pattern of continuity from the informal education of the home to the formal approach of the school.
    Also, Pell (2011) is of the onion that the teacher’s immediate task is to promote learning in his pupils. To do this, he needed to know more than the subject he teaches. He needs also to know the pupils. In this way, he would know those with deviant behaviour especially those who always run away from school. Hamersley and Woods (2006) says that “over the past years, work has been going on to see if in fact, some schools are managing to prevent-and others promote the growth of deviancy among their pupils and to see what is about the successful schools that may help excel”. Their work concentrated on a group of nine (9) secondary modern schools and on boys only within these schools. They found large differences between the schools in the characteristics of their output of pupils assessed in terms of rates of attendance, academic attainment and delinquency. The school with the top attendance rate average 89.1 percent attendance over the years and the bottom school only 77.2 per cent of its boys recorded as officially delinquent each year and the school with the bottom rate only 3.8 percent per year. Schools high on delinquency are low on academic attainment and low on attendance. The nine school are therefore producing children who appear to be very different. The attendance registers were collected in the same way in all the 9 schools and all of them used identical system of processing of their truants by means of Educational welfare officers.