A couple are facing heavy fines for not sending their teenage daughter to school as education chiefs carry out their threat to get tough on truancy.

Magistrates at Wantage told them that unless the 15-year-old girl's attendance rate rose above 85 per cent by the end of next year's Easter term, they would each be fined £400 and have to pay £75 costs.

The couple, who live near Faringdon, and cannot be named for legal reasons, were facing magistrates for the second time in a year, accused of failing to send one of their children to school.

In the latest breach, the court was told that during the last summer's term, the girl attended only 95 times out of a possible 136 - a rate of only 69 per cent. The parents had earlier denied failing to ensure the attendance of their daughter at her comprehensive school in Faringdon between mid-April and late July this year but they changed their pleas to guilty when they arrived at court.

The pair were also in breach of a 12-month conditional discharge imposed by the same bench on November 23 last year for a similar offence.

On that occasion the couple also denied the charge, but the case was proved, and in addition to the discharge, they were ordered to pay costs of £100.

Magistrates decided to defer sentence after hearing that the girl's attendance had risen to 82 per cent during the current term. Later, John Mitchell, for the Oxfordshire education authority, said that the case illustrated the seriousness with which it regarded truancy.

He said: "This is not the preferred course of action but if, as in this case, it results in improved attendance, all well and good."

David Wilson, headteacher at Faringdon School, which the girl attends, defended the involvement of education social workers in checking school attendance records on a weekly basis.

"We work with them rather than them working for us," he said. "Clearly school attendance is very important because if the children are not in school, how can we educate them?

"There are parents who lack authority and haven't put the right boundaries in place and are ineffectual and their children become 'school refusers'."

Mr Wilson added: "Then there are children who just will not attend, whose parents have done their absolute best, but they are just not getting anywhere, and if they put too much pressure on them, they'll end up leaving home and on the streets.

"Where schools get frustrated is when parents control their children and find all kinds of reasons for them not to be at school." Mr Wilson said the issue was a complex one with no general rule applying.

But he added: "I think schools in general feel we must be so much stronger and quicker in getting on to this."

Referring to the family and their daughter in question, he added: "I think we'll have a positive outcome on this one."

Story date: Saturday 18 December

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