CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Truancy is one of the major antisocial discipline problems among secondary school students in Nigeria. The concept and acts of indiscipline have received a lot of attention by researchers. Peck opined that the various behavioural disorders like stealing, violence, drug abuse, examination malpractice, sexual abuse and truancy have so undermined effective teaching-learning processes that some teachers have become helpless and disorganized in their task of impacting knowledge to the learners (Peck, 2002). In recent times, education has been recognized globally as one of the universal ways of survival and improvement of the well-being of individuals and society. The advent of formal education is considered as the foundation for national development as well as the surest way of making of life long achievements. For these reasons, families and citizens especially the youth and children now pay more attention to education. (Ogbonna et.al, 2013). However, the effort invested by the federal government of Nigeria on education had over the years proven a fruitful and promising reward to national development posing a lively hope for the better in the immediate future. It is of no doubt that several factors have posed relentless restriction to the trend of the rapid development in education; for which truancy in both student and teachers in primary and secondary schools has been a cankerworm to education. This has raised several questions to the quality of education and educational administration in Nigerian Secondary Schools. (Ogbonna et.al, 2013). According to Huzinga and Thornberry (2000), Truancy is defined as having an unexcused absence from school for at least three school days during five-day school week. Moreover, Salford City Counsel Report (2008) defined Truancy as the act when a child, who is believed to have been at school, fails to attend school classes without the permission or awareness of the parents or the school authority concerned. Truancy is an international unauthorized absence from school activities.