Historical Overview

Early homesteading laws allowed the settlers free land on which to build schools. Schooling was

perceived as the key to success for individuals and to the excellence of society (Mitchell, 1993).

Free and compulsory education came to England and Wales following the Elementary Education

Acts of 11 1870 and 1876, although not always on a full-time basis. The Education Act of 1918

finally abolished half time schooling, and made elementary education entirely free and

compulsory until the end of the term after the child's fourteenth birthday. Nevertheless, in most

parts of the United States the problem of illegal absence dates from 1876 (Galloway, 1985). In

the 1850s urban schools suffered from an extremely high turnover of students. Many students

were needed at home to do many of the chores, especially if they lived on a farm. Other students

worked outside of the home to help support the family. Poor attendance was a problem to

teachers and parents well before school attendance became compulsory (Pallister, 1969).

Pallister notes that enthusiasm for education varied with the standards of the school; good

schools quickly obtaining the support of parents, and similarly bad schools, least in the eyes of

parents, quickly losing support. School administrators were immediately faced with new

concerns considering that in 1900 only 6 percent of Americans had a diploma (Wise, 1994;Kay,

1991). It is clear that attendance rates varied little between 1904 and 1938, except in 1920 when

lower average attendance followed the social upheaval of the First World War. Galloway noted

that there is little evidence that attendance rates over the last ten to fifteen years (1970-1985)

differ very much from those earlier in the century (Galloway, 1985). Even with the increased

12 attendance and the increased graduation rates over the last 100 years, education is relatively

the same. A glaring example of this is the release of students for farm work in extremely
industrialized society. Our culture has changed but the reasons for excused absences have not

changed (Wise,1994). School attendance was a problem before education became free and

compulsory, and based on the researcher's knowledge and experience as an educator, it has

continued to be one ever since. The researcher notes that attendance figures can be interpreted in

different ways. There is little evidence that school attendance rates have changed noticeably

throughout the twentieth century.

Hence, teachers in the basic Schools in Piisi and Bamahu communities in the Wa municipality of
the Upper West Region sometimes absent themselves from School as a result of teacher illness,
family illness, unexpected personal responsibilities, and transportation problems that leads to
teacher absenteeism. Students’ poor academic performance in basic schools in the rural areas
continuously increasing from which

He would also associate with bad group that push him anyhow. Anything they do, he will also do
without having any second thought over it and this will eventually lure him/her into criminal
activities such as stealing, smoking, cultism, narcotics etc. all these will increase his confidence in
his bad behaviour which eventually have bad impact on his academic success, his brain will be
affected and his way of thinking will all be in negative form.

METHOD OF COLLECTING DATA

. The questionnaire items were formulated in fill in and Likert-type scale, a rating scale to make
responses simple and quick. A five-point Likert scale on agreement was developed for a given
set of questions. All that the participants needed to do was to put a tick in the box most
appropriate to their feeling.

Data Collection Instruments.

The following techniques and tools will be employed to collect data.

 Questionnaire

Questionnaire, both close and open-ended questions will be designed and administered to

interview students, teachers, education directorate and stakeholders on issues of academic

performance. This will provide stable and uniform measure without much variation. With close

ended questions, respondents will be restricted to a given set of answers from which they could

select their answers .This provides a greater uniformity in responses. In the open-ended questions,

respondent will be given the opportunity to provide their own answers to the questions.

Interviews

To obtain in-depth information on the academic performance, both structured and semi-structured

interview guide will be introduced in the data collection process. This will be used to collect data

through face- to- face encounter. In this case, there is a social interaction between an interviewer

and interviewee where the interviewer poses questions directed to the interviewee and records the

answers given.

The main data collecting instruments for this study were interviews for the senior management
and questionnaires for the teachers and students. Interviews enable researchers to collect views,
expressions, feelings and attitudes towards the issue of absenteeism in schools. (Cohen and
Manion) advantage of interviews is its adaptability to allow an interviewer to follow ideas, probe
for responses and investigate motives and feelings which a questionnaire cannot capture (Janesick,
1998). The interviews used were neither completely structured nor completely unstructured. (Bell,
1999) indicated that, loose structure is to ensure all topics which are considered crucial to the study
are covered and to eliminate some problems of entirely structured interviews. To complement the
interviews, the researchers used questionnaires (with close and open-ended items) to developed
based on an analysis of the quantitative needs of the research questions of the study, that is, to
determine what is needed to answer the questions of the study. A questionnaire is a commonly
used research instrument in survey research designs. It is used to make data collection easy and
less time consuming and it has the potential of covering large samples. Observation is also used
for the study