AIBU to not understand how "school refusers" are a thing?

[Idontunderstandmodernlife]

There seems to be a lot of parents that have children that they simply can't get to go to school no matter what they do - these children are often called "school refusers". Parents say they have done absolutely everything to get their child into school but nothing works.

I hate to be that "in my day" person but I simply don't get where these "school refusers" have come from because they simply didn't exist a decade or 15 years ago. Kids just went to school. I never knew of a child that simply didn't turn up most of the time when I was in school? now there seems to be one in every class

What has changed that parents are now finding it impossible to get their child to school? Have schools got that much worse? are parents more lenient? are children more forceful? has children's mental health declined? what is it?

I think for my age group (GenX) there were “special schools” for students who were ND, had MH issues, extreme physical disabilities and extreme behavioural issues. Generally they were all lumped in together.

So we rarely experienced school refusers in the same way as today, where inclusion is the norm.

This may be the dumbest post i ever read.

My school refused used to smash his head against the wall rather than go to school.

Should I have stitched him up, wiped off the blood and got in him into school before 1st break?

My late dp stopped going to school age 14, all he wanted to do was become a snooker player. The Head teacher contacted his dad & after being reassured that he spent his days practicing & wasn't walking the streets never bothered him again. Late dp turned professional a month after turning 16.

How do you feel about your own replies? They also arguably read as defensive.

You’ve yet to concede that you made false statements in your OP.

I think it would be reasonable to suggest that you either posted this to be goady, or you simply don’t like being wrong

Snap. But it was a long and difficult road back. I hope you and DS are also doing better now

I taught students who were school refusers.

I remember one girl, who really didn’t want to be in school.

her parents would make her go. She’d turn up, and then usually a couple of lessons into the day she’d make herself be sick.

she was only allowed to go home if she’d physically vomited because she used to say she felt sick and get sent home. They worked out what was going on and decided she wasn’t really ill.

she got very good at sticking her fingers down her throat and vomiting.

48 hour rule applies at the point (this was pre Covid)

I felt very very sorry for her.

We didn't use the term school refuser but two girls in my year had quite a lot of time out of school. One was Anorexic and another had various issues with stress or anxiety.

I suspect gaming addiction does play a part in the increased numbers now.

My brother was a school refuser 20 years ago. We did in fact try everything including trying to physically drag him there. It's always happened it's just more pronounced since the lockdown restrictions now.

I knew a couple back in the 00s. They were just called truants and you didn’t notice them because they weren’t in your classes or friend group.

I was at school in the 90s. The children who would be called ‘school refusers’ now played truant. They left the house in the morning and wandered the streets all day. They were labelled as naughty trouble makers and no one made a big effort to get them to school apart from a visit from the twag man (truant officer). We also had a boy with SEN who rarely went to school as he was really anxious. I suspect there were more children we just didn’t know about.

I think it’s really easy to say ‘I wouldn’t let my children refuse to go to school’- I’d love to think that I’ll always get my kids to school but you don’t know unless you’re in that situation.

How do you physically make that happen though? When my daughters were aged five and school was new, they would sometimes cry and say they wanted to stay with mummy. I would just physically pick them up and pass them into the arms of their teacher/bus monitor. No problem.

My 11 year old refused to go to school for two days last year - it turned out there were reasons and we dealt with it. She's not at all a naughty child who gets away with too much, this was a specific incident. However, while she is very slim she is also tall and picking her up and handing her over to someone else simply wasn't an option. I threatened her with no wifi, TV etc. but she was screaming too hysterically to take any of that in. She was clinging to me fiercely, enough to leave me bruised, trembling and screaming her little heart out. The bus monitor is no taller than her and simply would not even consider the idea of trying to drag her off me and onto the bus by force. Ditto the male bus driver. How exactly should I have not allowed it? What is your brilliant suggestion when they're too big to manipulate physically?

I'm 50 and there were definitely school refusers in my day. There was one whole family in particular. The truant officer would visit but there were no fines for non-attendance then and there was no way he could actually force them in. Another we were told had glandular fever. For years - and yet she was frequently spotted on TV at the Smash Hits concert roadshow thing they used to do every year, on Top of the Pops, on Saturday Superstore. Another couple of sisters were rarely ever in school because they were carers for their disabled mother. Yes, the truant officers would moan at the parents but didn't have any administrative tools to force compliance. These all seem to fit your definition because the parents were aware and apparently unbothered.

I probably would have been a school refuser except I would have been beaten so I just played truant instead. Not for any particularly devastating reason, I just didn't want to go. There were no mobile phones and school rarely bothered to let my parents know. I would just forge a sickness note the next day. I grew up to flinch if my father would simply raise his hand to turn on a light switch because I was so scared of him and have always hated him. Do you suggest that kind of fear is a better way to get kids into school? Mentally destroyed but hey, she can work out 8x9, yippee!

It was all easy then because there wasn't the same pressure on attendance. My parents were certainly never given an attendance percentage for the term. Parents didn't get fined for 'unauthorised absence' - the term didn't even exist as far as I'm aware. There was no doctor certification to prove continued illness. School refusers existed but people just shrugged and accepted it rather than bleating all over social media.

I remember when the trolls were better around here.

How would you get a child into school who didn’t want to? Perhaps they were incredibly anxious too.

please explain?

Obviously. But nowadays kids don’t need friends as much. They have Tik Tok and You Tube and seem to be content with online friends. I work in a school and we are in a crisis. Parents need to parent from day one. Don’t make excuses for them. Seek help early on and support the school.

"I hate to be that "in my day" person"

Of course you don't - hence your post.

"I simply don't get where these "school refusers" have come from because they simply didn't exist a decade or 15 years ago."

Of course they did. How would you have known about the ins/outs of other kids/other parents' kids?

"I never knew of a child that simply didn't turn up most of the time when I was in school? now there seems to be one in every class"

You not knowing any doesn't mean there weren't any.

Seems like a post designed to invoke criticism of parenting. 🕵️

Children have always skipped school ? I remember hiding under my bed as a teenager to skip school my friend would leave her house daily to walk to school and simply never show up her parents worked no-one noticed for ages there was a child in my dds primary registered just never attended these days schools crack down and try and find the child but back in the day they didn't so they just went unnoticed

Then there are the children kept home to be unpaid carers children who are abused and the parents keep them home and claim school refusal

So yes it was always a thing

This is so true.
Things seem to be 'tolerated' in school which would never be tolerated at home. My daughter had many weeks of being scratched, hit and hair pulled by a child in her class with SEN. But the school said it couldn't be prevented. If this was hapenning at home we would have social services knocking on our door.

She now tells me that they have to lock their classroom door from the inside to stop aggressive children from the specialist unit from getting into their classroom during the day, that she regularly sees children trying to climb over the fence, and staff having to restrain them to stop them hurting themselves or others, and getting hit in the process, 2 staff have broken bones this academic year alone.

Our children are experiencing and witnessing violence in a place they should feel safe, no wonder some refuse to go to school!

Yes it's always happened ,however I do think there is more of it now.
I work in a high school and there's a lot of long term refusers.
If I refused as a kid I would have been dragged in by my parents kicking and screaming. There wouldn't have been ' we've tried everything '

2005 Rory was abducted and murdered. Bless him he was dropped of in the morning, but never made it to school. Nobody knew he never made it to school until his Grandad went to collect him at 3pm. Vital hours were lost.

That changed school policies they must know where kids are, if they are at home or whatever.

That also pushed schools to look more closely at why kids weren't in school. There was probably also a push around the same time to get kids off the streets, a recognition that kids kicking around the streets are likely to get into trouble.

I believe school refusal always existed just its more monitored now.

My mother would have physically carried me into school if she had to. If I got too big, she'd have got my father to do it. No room for school refusal with my parents (and not much sympathy or understanding either).

So much of it around these days usually from.the same people who claim autism ADHD etc is new and never existed 🤔

Yes of course if you consistently missed work, but as I mentioned in my post this was just one case i know off where I think it was more parenting of not wanting to have any sort of battle or where it was just easier to not argue with their child and it grew from there of the child realising they could get away with just refusing to go. I do think there are more cases of children with emotional needs and school not the right system for them nowadays though which is what I was reposonding to the op about.

My mum in the 1960s lost along with he brother a whole year of school (year 5 for her and year 1 for her brother) her parents split up and her mum moved back to her home town had a breakdown and just didn’t send them.
No one cared, no one looked for them, no one noticed - my grandad returned after a year and got them back into school.

as it happened the year off meant my Mum failed the compulsory 11+ something it took her years to educationally overcome

so they would have for a very long time just gone missing

OP did you see Adolescence? The Stephen Graham drama? The classroom scenes are tame compared to what actually happens. Obviously not every school everywhere, but enough so that many children simply cannot cope.

Children with any kind of SPD or ND feel the lack of control. The sense that anything could happen, and often does.

I had the misfortune to work in a school temporarily in which a girl was "jumped on" and beaten up in the corridor (so in plain sight) by another girl. The staff were clearly afraid of the girl who'd done the beating up because she was from a gangster type of family. The consequences were minimal. I wouldn't be persuading my child to go into a school like that if they told me they were afraid. I'd believe them.

I was badly bullied and refused to go to school in 96/97.