Previous research shows that truancy in upper secondary school positively correlates to the student’s future level of involvement in society. As such, in order to support an individual’s positive development, it is essential to work with early interventions to increase school attendance. One such preventive initiative is to employ full-time mentors who specifically hold the responsibility to monitor and follow-up student’s absence.

This study focuses on full-time mentors working in upper-secondary school, and aims to examine a student’s perspective on the work of the full-time mentors. Collection of material has been done through the execution of eight semi-structured interviews with eight students in an upper secondary school in Stockholm, Sweden. The student’s statements have been interpreted and analyzed from the theoretical standpoint of social constructivism. As such, in this study, the work of the mentor as well as the student’s perception of the mentor’s role, is perceived as part of a social process and consequently dependent on its context. This means that components such as the distribution of power between student and mentor have been relevant to consider, in relation to interventions meant to increase student attendance.

The study highlights the importance of using communicative tools, and mutual conversations, as well as building and maintaining well-functioning relationships between students and mentors. The result shows that the way that full-time mentors communicate with students, could be made more explicit, so that routines and expectations leading from that communication is clear to the student. In addition, the study’s result also indicate that full-time mentors could better adapt their way of communicating, in order to avoid an unbalanced power distribution between the full-time mentor and the student.

The conclusion of the study is that communicative tools, such as relationship-creating and mutual conversations, when thoughtfully applied, can increase participation in school and as such, reduce absence.