Missing School: Discourses about extended school non-attendance in Australia

School has been compulsory in Australia for over 125 years. Worry about why some children do not attend, and how this can be changed, has existed for nearly as long. Educators, researchers and policymakers agree that extended school non-attendance has serious consequences. However, there are huge differences in how these groups understand nonattendance and how they propose it should be addressed. Over the last decade, school attendance rates have fallen steadily in Australia, and in 2022, the Commonwealth Government called an inquiry into school refusal and related matters. The present study aimed to uncover the discourses about extended school non-attendance in Australia using the inquiry’s source materials to broaden conversations about school attendance and generate new ideas about how to address declining attendance. This study employed a poststructuralist framing that recognised the plurality of views on non-attendance, an emancipatory methodological stance foregrounding the concerns of those not attending and a Critical Discourse Analysis method to analyse 150 inquiry submissions. It investigated who submitted, what they said about extended school nonattendance and the solutions they proposed. The study identified eight different discourses in the research literature and found all manifested, to different degrees, within the submissions. Applying poststructuralist theory and Critical Discourse Analysis to the submissions revealed their hidden assumptions, missing voices and experiences and intrinsic complexities and contradictions. The study concluded that both education researchers and education policymakers need to develop new processes that challenge these assumptions, include those missing voices and experiences, and better address the complex and contradictory nature of extended school non-attendance.