Truancy, delinquency and school-exclusion pose major challenges to the drive to promote social inclusion and raise standards for all. Many children who are truants or become excluded from school have inherited a sense of ‘educational alienation’ from their parents, whose own negative perceptions of the education system make it difficult for them to collaborate with the school.

In this groundbreaking book, the authors show how the cycle of educational alienation can be broken, to enable parents and schools to work together to contribute to children’s educational, social and emotional well-being. They illustrate this by exploring a highly successful initiative in a school with severe socio-economic disadvantages, which, in conjunction with a school-based social work service, developed an effective family-teacher-community alliance. They demonstrate the substantial improvements that such a multiprofessional approach can bring about in reducing truancy, delinquency and exclusion and helping children to become positive, fulfilled and included members of their schools and communities.

Breaking the Cycle of Educational Alienation is key reading for teachers and trainee teachers, child psychologists, educational psychologists and social workers, whose task it is to ensure that ‘Every Child Matters’.