PUPILS at a Basingstoke school may be forced to pay for their own exams if they play truant or have a poor attendance record.

Fort Hill Community School head Keith Fry told The Gazette that, as a "guardian of the public purse", he would not waste money on those pupils who stood no chance of passing exams because of a lack of attendance.

His stance, which follows revalations that truancy is on the increase across the Basingstoke borough, has angered one mum who has been told she must pay £180 for her 16-year-old daughter to sit nine GCSE exams.

Debbie Hancock, 43, of Dover Close, Winklebury, said she cannot afford to pay for her daughter Amanda to sit her exams this summer.

While Mrs Hancock admitted Amanda's attendance record has been poor and said she has received letters from the school about the problem, she added her daughter suffers from asthma and severe eczema which sometimes leaves her skin so sore that she can't go to school.

She said: "She is not a truant - she's been off school because of illness and problems with staff. I think they are totally inflexible. At the end of the day, they shouldn't charge anybody to take exams. I think it is disgusting that they should even think of charging for exams."

Amanda said: "Sometimes I have been off and sometimes it is my fault, but it shouldn't affect how I do my GCSEs. They are saying because I have been off I am not capable of doing my GCSEs. But if I had been at school all the time I still might not pass my exams."

Mr Fry would not talk about individual cases. However, he said: "We are the guardians of the public purse. We are funded by public money so we have a duty to spend that money wisely and effectively.

"Where a student has attended school and worked to the best of his or her ability and completed the course work, they will have an entry guaranteed.

"But where a student fails to attend so that they have no reasonable chance of succeeding in the examination because they have missed so much work, then it is a waste of money to fund the examination."

He added: "If somebody is off from school through no fault of their own, such as illness, then, of course, I am not going to be inhuman about it. We will take that into consideration.

"We look at each case on its merits and look at individual circumstances."

Figures released this week show that truancy in secondary schools has risen by seven per cent in Basingstoke since 1997, although the increase was significantly lower than the 40 per cent increase across Hampshire as a whole.

In a bid to tackle the truancy problem, welfare officers, accompanied by the county's police, toured the streets this week looking for youngsters who were skipping school.

Children absent without authority were being escorted to school, with offenders being registered with the county council and the police.

Any parent with a child of school age who is not in school was being asked to supply details and explain why the youngsters were not where they should be.