Families in the firing line: prosecutions for truancy in Coventry, 1874-1899.

This case study of truancy in Coventry puts into a local context a national phenomenon of considerable concern to local authorities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The records of parents prosecuted for their child's truancy over a twenty-five year period provided the data for analysis. It was possible to produce a profile of the truants and their families within the socio-economic context of a Midlands industrial town with a unique mix of occupational sectors. Parental involvement in local textile, watchmaking and cycle industries certainly affected the propensity of children to truant, but other factors such as housing and neighbourhood seem also to have been important factors as indicators of truancy. Underlying all of these issues was the effect of poverty on parental attitudes to schooling, exemplified most starkly by the experience of lone mothers who figured more prominently in the truancy figures by the 1890s, and by when more parents conformed to school attendance laws.