Educationally disaffected young offenders - Youth court and agency responses to truancy and school exclusion

Links between educational disaffection and delinquency are well established ; in contrast, courts' and agencies' responses to school absenteeism amongs t defendants have received little research attention. In this article, the authors use data from a study of school-aged defendants who were truanting or excluded at the time of sentence to examine critically the provision of pre-sentence school-based information to courts and the extent to which sup ervision by the youth justice agencies made any impact on the educational s ituation of or subsequent offending by, defendants, They suggest a tentativ e taxonomy and conclude that a new approach to multi-agency working will be necessary if Youth Offending Teams and panels set up under the Crime and D isorder Act 1998 and the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 are e ffectively to address the problem of educationally disaffected offenders.