Why don’t the kids want to go to school? School absentees, school culture, and opportunity structure

Abstract

Session: Att lära och fostra för demokratiskt medborgarskap

Purpose

The article is a contribution to studying school culture and opportunity structure to gain in-depth knowledge of how the school as an institution can work to ensure that fewer children become absent from school.

Design/methodology/approach

The theoretical perspectives that are used in the paper are opportunity structure, school culture, and school as an institution.

Research limitations/implications

The purpose of the paper is to investigate how guardians of children who do not go to school perceive and experience the school's school culture and opportunity structure with the student's schooling as a starting point and investigate how principals perceive and experience school culture and opportunity structures at the schools with absent students as a starting point, the qualitative interview was chosen as a method.

Practical implications/implications

What do the guardians and principals lack? What do they get access to? How do they deal with this?  The empirical material will be analyzed based on the concept of opportunity structure with a focus on the non-cognitive forms of the possibility structure.

Originality/value

Can the creation of a strong opportunity structure be a way for the school as an institution to achieve a higher goal fulfillment even for children who are about to fall out of the school system? This information is important knowledge for the school when it, as an institution, is to organize its activities so that it can best meet the needs of the students with relevant support. This is to increase students' chances of achieving school success.  

Findings

The school's knowledge in these areas will in the long run increase the likelihood of the students achieving higher goal fulfillment.