Absent with Cause

First published in 1980, Absent with Cause , reissued here with a new preface, looks at the Bayswater Centre, which provided full-time education for young people who had stopped attending comprehensive schools and for whom the alternative may well have been home tuition or residential provision in community homes or assessment centres.

Reviews for the original edition:

‘This is a study of the practice of alternative education, largely based on an examination of the Bayswater Centre in Bristol, and its relationship with a similar Danish institution. The ethnographic accounts of the life and work of the children and staff are quite outstanding; the motivations and concerns of the “problem children” and the determinants of their identity and self-image shine out from the pages in a way that must give powerful illumination to many readers. It demonstrates not only the sociological imagination but also what it can deliver.’ – John Eggleston

'Much has been written on the secondary school curriculum since the Great Education Debate, but I have read nothing more imaginative and practical than Roger White’s book. This is in part because he so rightly refuses to divorce curricular issues from their social context. From a hidden corner of the system, he has helped us to specify the directions in which we ought to grow.' - Professor David Hargreaves