Ability tackles truancy

Truancy, wagging, skipping school, bunking off. The minor misdemeanour is sometimes considered a risqué rite of passage, so involving police when students skip school might seem like overkill to some.

Statistically, however, truancy is a harbinger for future problems, and as UQ’s Professor Lorraine Mazerolle and her research team have discovered, if police get involved at this early stage of antisocial behaviour in a positive, collaborative way, it can have a profound impact on reducing later, more serious offences.

THE PROGRAM

The Ability School Engagement Program (ASEP) is a truancy reduction program that leverages partnerships to create real change. The program targets youths aged between 10 and 16, whose attendance in the three previous school terms is 85 per cent or less, and who have no legitimate explanation (such as medical illness) for their absences from school.

For the ASEP trial, Professor Mazerolle and her team worked with the Queensland Police and 11 Queensland schools to select 102 at-risk students and their families to participate.

“In the several disadvantaged communities of Brisbane we targeted, the attitude and behaviour of some students towards the police demonstrated an obviously strained relationship," Professor Mazerolle says.

“My team and I at UQ, in collaboration with the Queensland Police Service and the Department of Education, designed ASEP to intervene at a critical developmental time in a young person’s life, empowering the young person to understand the consequences of their behaviour in a ‘procedurally just’ environment, where they feel respected and heard by representatives from their school and the police. 

“It’s also an opportunity to educate and inform their parents of their legal obligations to have their kids go to school, which isn’t always something they are aware of.”

THE RESULTS

The ASEP trials showed a very clear, two-fold benefit to the approach – intervention group participants were overwhelmingly more likely to attend school and were less likely to behave anti-socially than the trial participants in the control group.

“The results show that in just a very short, 45-minute intervention, the program engaged the young people and their parents to think about the impact of their truancy and its consequences," Professor Mazerolle says.

“Just that subtle nudge has had very positive and lasting effects; it decreases both the child’s impulsivity and their parents’ willingness to take risks.

“Even two years after their ASEP participation, kids from the intervention group were more willing to go to school, attended school more, offended less and had less self-reported antisocial behaviour over time than those in the control group.”

The trial also revealed that parents from the intervention group became significantly more aware of their legal responsibilities. Unsurprisingly, when they believed that they could be prosecuted if their child didn’t attend school, attendance rates increased.

Clearly, a collaborative, partnership approach with schools, families, students and police is an effective way to address truancy and, potentially, youth crime. Considering the increased pressure on police to handle a wide variety of issues, this study provides evidence that a collaborative partnership can be a relatively simple, sustainable, and effective option to get young people more engaged with their education and to reduce juvenile crime in a comprehensive, procedurally just way.

THE NEXT STEP

The trial’s success has been recognised within Australia and internationally. In 2017, the National Institute of Justice in the United States of America chose ASEP for their CrimeSolutions website, which features international best practice in law enforcement initiatives (and making ASEP one of only three Australian programs to ever be selected for coverage on the site). The Police Executive Research Forum also featured the program in its research briefs.

Professor Mazerolle and her team won the American Society of Criminology (Division of Experimental Criminology)’s prestigious Award for Outstanding Experimental Field Trial, which recognised it as an outstandingly designed field trial by experts in experimental criminology, with strong policy-relevant research findings.

Professor Mazerolle has been investigating how ASEP could be translated to an international setting with law enforcement agencies in Boston and Prince George’s County in the United States. She is also working with the Queensland Department of Education and the Queensland Police to take the trial’s proof of concept and upscale it to other Queensland and interstate schools.

“The next stage would be to upscale ASEP to a bigger population, and conduct another randomised control trial with more program participants, to measure how it translates into other social contexts and environments.”