“"Wayne", all schools are required to have an anti bullying policy including Ellis Guilford and are required to implement it. Bullies are ingenious at covering up their actions and it is often one persons word against several others especially if it is not physical bullying. It is not my contention that all schools are perfect but a lot of the bullying takes place away from school and much nowadays is on the web so it is not just a school problem.”

“All schools nowadays are required to have an anti bullying policy and to see that it is implemented. So BLawrenson how is it that my granddaughter refused point blank to go to Ellis Guilford school and the school said it had no instances of bullying?? Thank God, she has now left school and is a lot more happier than she was at that school.”

“bit naive that blawrenson”

“Keeping kids either in a main-stream school or special centre during the day is not only vital for their education and outcomes but for the community. It should be a basic duty of the authorities to ensure they know if a child should be in school and when they are not. Having kids running around causing problems for themselves or their communities is completely unacceptable.

Some facts: 90,000 children have criminal convictions (not just those that have committed crimes and doesn't represent the number of crimes). 6,0000 children were permanently excluded last year. More worrying is that local authorities have no idea how many children in their area should actually be attending school; there is not statistic available for the 'missing and lost'.”

“In that case "Countytilidie" I would expect this to come out prior to any Court proceedings and that action appropriate to the case could be taken to safeguard the parents.”

“and what do you do in the case of some parents who are scared of their kids,fear of violence,it does happen”

“"Chewchewchew", in cases such as the one you highlight then I think the Court should turn their attentions to the child. Perhaps there is a need for compulsory attendance centres where such truants would be required to stay during school holidays or weekends. Being deprived of mobile phones, tv, mp3 players, Facebook and Twitter for a few weeks and made to behave responsibly might convince them that it was sensible to attend school regularly and at least Mum would have some respite from a stroppy teenager.”

“One thing that can be particularly difficult is when parents have to go to work before school start times so they can't take their kids right up to the gate if needs be. I know someone who had this problem. She had a mortgage, full time job and her teenaged daughter was truanting but unless she jeopardised her job by turning up late every morning then all she could do was use other punishment such as grounding and stopping pocket money, guilt tripping... none of which worked. Getting children to school is very hard if you have other responsibilities that you can't ignore.”

“Mary

I suppose because you were bullied is why you called me names on here last week, is it?”

“Please do not take martynofderby's advice. For the first five days of a fixed period exclusion, you are responsible for your child and must make sure they are not in a public place during school hours. You could most certainly face prosecution for ignoring this.”