Absent

The Tories know nothing about the state education system, and it shows. How much do they think that schools want habitual truants to turn up? What do they think would be the impact of those pupils on the educational experience of their peers? On any given day, there must be a thousand truants in County Durham. If there are a dozen people employed to deal with them, then I'd be extremely surprised. I could easily believe that there were half that many, or even fewer. And that in the course of the working day, most or all of them seldom or never leave County Hall.