PARIS, Sept 25: For the first time in Europe students at a French high school are being assigned supermarket bar codes in an attempt to better control an absentee rate that school authorities say has grown much too important in recent weeks.

The bar codes, a series of black stripes on a white background, are most widely associated with products bought at supermarkets, where they are read electronically at check-out countrers.

If a bar code based system has just been introduced at a French high school, the Lycee Saint-Exupery located at Marseilles in southern France, it’s because, says principal Georges Turrin, he needed to find an effective way to attempt to control an absentee rate that officially has reached ten pre cent.

The new system - code-named Gedep (Gestion des defaults de presence en temps reel), which stands for Real-time management of students’ absence — has cost all of 77,000 dollars to introduce.

According to the new system just introduced at Saint-Exupery, which like the Marseille neighbourhood where it is located has a largely North African Arab population of more than 70 per cent — teachers now greet students at homeroom in the morning, and before each class, with a list of their names followed by bar- codes — one for each student — and then proceed to go down the list with an electronic pencil.

The list is then transmitted by way of a special device located in each classroom, and the absence of any student is automatically notified firstly to a central computer in an office poetically called “Service de la Vie Scolaire” which in turn is received by a school employee who automatically telephones parents to ask where their children are.

“Before, it would take us a day or two to realise students were not present, then between five days and a week to notify their parents that their children had been absent,” says Isabelle Seve, one of the officials in charge of operating the new system, “whereas now they know in real time that their children have not come to classes, hopefully resulting in their attempt to locate them and send them off to school post haste.”

Cedric, a constant absentee, said he didn’t think the system would work, but was forced to admit that he was surprised one afternoon to learn upon arriving home that his parents had been notified of his absence and proceeded to demand to know where he’d been.