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?

1. They have always existed. It was called playing truant when I was a kid.
2. Schools are not a suitable learning environment for too many kids.
3. Too many children have unmet needs due to years of chronic underfunding.
4. A minority of parents don’t care and let their kids stay off and blame it them being a school refusers when actually the kid just can’t be arsed and the parents can’t be arsed parenting.
5. Point number 4 applies to a tiny percentage of school refusers.

Of course they existed, I was one. I had a really traumatic and abusive childhood which I managed to hide and suppress until about year 10 when I flipped and couldn’t deal with it all anymore. I daren’t tell anyone so instead just stopped going to school. I was depressed looking back and didn’t get any proper support for it at all. The school tried to punish me for not going in, then attempted to incentivise me a little but eventually just gave up. I left school with no GCSEs.

Did also have a situation in year 10 which I’d say caused the sudden change. I’d been dating a year 13 boy (which never should have happened- I was 14, he was almost 18) and it turned out another girl in my year was also dating him. She was kind of rough and ready and unimpressed he’d ‘chosen’ me when she gave him an ultimatum so decided to beat me up one day. I didn’t even know she existed prior to this, it was a huge school.

Anyway, I sorted it all in the end and now have a PhD but I could easily have amounted to nothing and indeed this was probably expected of me especially since I got pregnant shortly after leaving.

I wasn’t the only one, one of my friends was badly bullied and just stopped going in year 10 as well I think or maybe year 9. This was an inner city comp in a deprived area.

What's that got to do with anything? I said that my father has the capacity to manhandle me and would have. Statement of fact. I didn't say if it was a good or bad thing. What do you really think a child who was manhandled thinks of it, having lived it?

Goady McGoady

You might be surprised how much of teaching is repetition.

if you have kids - think about the hours and hours of reading practice that children need in order to get proficient at reading, most primary schools ask for parents to read every day with children.

if you don’t - think about trying to learn a new language. Most of the fluency that you need to have in order to speak it is generated by repetition, you do a little bit every day. Hence Duolingo streaks etc, and also why it’s so much easier to learn a language by immersion - very high levels of exposure and repetition.

now you can’t miss 100% of school and still learn stuff.

but higher attaining kids really can miss quite substantial chunks without it majorly impacting their ability to do well. Often if they are the kind of kid who is top of their year effortlessly they have a very good memory anyway and don’t need a lot of the repetition.

lower attaining kids on the other hand if they want decent gcse results can’t afford to miss the repetition. They’re often the kids whose parents say “they are totally scatter brained and can’t remember anything” whereas the higher attaining kids are the ones whose parents say “you only have to tell them once and they’ve got it!”

it’s why homeschooling takes much less time than school - you can target directly at where the kid is and give the repetition they need rather than going for the average of the 30 kids in front of you.

That's not even remotely related to what EBSA is. Please read some of the posts from parents like me whose children desperately wanted to just walk in like everyone else but COULDN'T. We're frozen stiff in the car, white as a sheet, tears rolling down their face as the minutes ticked by.

I always think of truant and school refusing as different.

at a very high level:

truant: parents don’t know
school-refusing: parents do know

It's easy enough if you have a decent textbook and are bright in the right kind of way.

Nowadays it's even easier with YouTube and CGP and Hodder revision guides.

I wasn't a school refuser but my teachers were of variable quality and I certainly taught myself chunks of Physics GCSE and the stats part of Maths A-level, because those particular teachers weren't very good.

Nowadays GCSEs and A-levels are a bit more technical and expert advice is very useful, but not every teacher is expert! And classes can be big and loud.

I am a teacher by the way. I'm successful with most students but there is the occasional one who'd rather bunk and teach themselves. Some succeed. It's a good life skill if you can...useful for teaching in fact!

It's not as binary as that. Most parents are at work so much depends on the communication of the school and the deviousness/desperation of the child. All behaviour is communication, as they say.

Well I might have agreed with you until my neurodivergent teen had a severe nervous system burnout. I’ve learnt never to judge a parent. Genuine school avoidance can have many complex reasons behind it.

I never went after the age of 14 in the 90’s,there wasn’t any kind of help back then,I was just put on the dumb table,school didn’t care,I was sent to a school for “naughty”kids but I didn’t go there either.

I went to school in the 80/90's and we definately had kids who refused to go to school for various reasons. Its always been a thing. Truency was so common, no one thought anything of it, it happend every day.
As with everything, one size does not fit all. The way they are taught is not right for everyone. Some never feel they fit in. You cant fit square pegs into round holes. My mum went to school in the 60s and it was the same.

The Core of the blazer issue is schools are stricter on blazers for no real reason.

My secondary never had lockers. And lockers only solves the issue of winter coats. Kids put on / took of their blazers as they saw fit. They didn't need to wait for a Head teacher to deem they could remove them.

@NeverSeenThatColourBlue and others.

The key is in your wording.
So if we ‘shouldn’t let them stay off’ . What would you do in your shoes if your teen who is the same size as you who is wracked with anxiety crying under the duvet saying they want to go into school but just can’t?

It’s absolutely not a case of ‘ok darling I’ll put a duvet on the sofa and get you some breakfast’. It’s much more complex than that and a frankly terrible, miserable and terrifying existence. If it was as simple as us as parents making the decision and saying yes or no then the vast majority would be at school wouldn’t they?

Not Covid. LOCKDOWN. Important to make that distinction. If Saint Boris and his merry men cared about children at all, they would have found ways to get children back in school, and reopened the schools much sooner. But instead, they frightened the public so much, that they painted themselves into a corner, and made it politically impossible to get children back to school.

This is appalling.

And it was much worse in Scotland. Our children were off school from March - August 2020, then again January - mid-April 2021. In the first phase, my three kids had no teaching other than a couple of worksheets.

It's screen addiction, combined with snow plough parenting. Every single school refuser I have worked with is addicted to Roblox and parents say the child needs their iPad 'to regulate', but on the contrary it is the screen addiction causing the dysregulation.

Some parents don't fully acknowledge the dangers of screen addiction in this generation. The algorithms on social media push parents into support groups for emotional based school anxiety. Mumsnetters are rife with these parents though as there is such a high numbers of neurodiverse screen addicted forum users, so answers on here are biased.

Well, I was one in the early 90s.

I was bullied so much, and a few other reasons, that I skived a lot of secondary school. Always pretending to be sick or just refusing to go in (or skiving).

But there wasn’t an obsession with attendance back then, so it wasn’t a big deal.

Education and the educational environment has changed.
I was at school in the 80s.

Classrooms were quite formal, no clutter, a few informative posters but not much. Compare to now where many classrooms, particularly primary, are a sensory nightmare, laminated tat everywhere, covering most of the walls and even the ceiling. Cluttered learning zones covering the room which the brains of some children filter out and no longer see, but for more sensitive children remains a sensory nightmare every single day.

Disruptive children were sent out immediately, many ended up truanting (EBSA before there was the huge drive of attendance above all else) so we’re not a problem in the classroom, and were often just left to it.

Teachers had more options to be flexible with their pupils and were trusted to teach. By secondary school I remember having it instilled in us that if we learned or not was up to us, our futures were our responsibility. Now teachers are directed how to teach, how to reach pointless targets that are unrealistic for many pupils, teachers are held responsible for pupils outcomes which means they put more and more pressure on pupils. They also seem to have buzzwords they need to parrot without knowing how to reach less able children, so it comes across as blaming the child for not being resilient enough, or for not having a good growth mindset.

There are now many children in mainstream school who should be in special schools, but (thanks Tony Blair!) now spaces are scarce and in lots of cases just not there.

Vocational options within schools are very often not available any more. Options to leave at 14 to go to an apprenticeship or to a vocational college are not really options now, and there are some children who just do not respond to academic learning at all, even if they’re very bright.

80% of secondary schools are now academies, many of which suit a very narrow range of pupils, and which actively exacerbate behavioural problems as they have lost the options and flexibility that schools used to have. They tend to have strict authoritarian rules and a dogmatic approach, particularly towards pupils who need a bit of a kinder/more fun, more flexible approach.

Attendance is god. It matters more to some schools than our children’s health. We are threatened and talked down to by people who do not give a shit what’s going on with our children, they just want bums on seats at all costs. My youngest’s school right now understand him, and are so lovely, unthreatening and helpful that I cry every single meeting, because in 21 years of having dc in school this is the first time that I feel understood and supported and it’s overwhelming and unexpected, which is very sad as it should be the norm.

The curriculum has narrowed. Break times have often been whittled down to the bare minimum. Bullying is often ignored. Societal issues are increasing, contributing to a major mental health crisis. We are led by incompetent fools who are removed from real life. We have people dictating how parents should be behaving, telling us we are the problem, without addressing the changes made that have directly led to this perfect storm of more and more children (and adults tbh) struggling, needing diagnoses to have some support.

This country tries to sort out education by increasing rules, piling on more targets, and more and more children suffer, and more teachers leave. The status quo is kept because whose voices are listened to are the ones saying “well I managed to get my child in and they’re fine”, and blaming parents for issues that are out of their control and that are largely down to living in a society that doesn’t understand what humans need - not just the straightforward easy humans, but the messy, tricky humans who are all being damaged by it, which then hurts society more because they need more and more support.

I’ve discussed this with a few teachers. Some are ex teachers who fully agree, and those are the reasons they left. I know many young teachers who left to home ed their own children because they didn’t want them to go through the broken school system. I also know some who get very defensive and double down on how great it is, how children and their parents are the bane of their lives.

There are a great many changes that could be made that would improve the situation for many for free. But they are too wedded to their blessed guidelines to ever try to implement some different structures and drop ones that aren’t working, so I don’t see things changing any time soon. More and more children will school refuse. More young adults will be unable to work. More humans will need diagnoses in order to learn how to live their lives, and more will need government assistance, because those are the choices our leaders have made for us, and now it’s biting them in the arse they’re blaming the very people they’ve pushed to destruction.

@Dinosweetpea

Agreed..

There is a world of difference between a child who is saying they don’t want to go in but can V the many others who can’t .

There are countless cases of parents (I was one of them) forcing their child into school as ‘everyone has to go to school. It’s non negotiable’ … and then this resulting in far worse outcomes than missing school.

In my case it was 12 months of autistic burn out, self harm that required hospital admissions , 3 attempts on her life, being cut off from all of her friends and the worst 3 years of our lives. So no. Tough love doesn’t work in all cases. I learnt that the hard way.

We didn't have internet back in the day as freely available to read about everyone's schools refusers.
They've been around forever.
I had one out of 4. I had people saying just pick her up and take her there drop her off and drive away.
She is bigger than me. How on earth am I going to accomplish that.
Most who don't understand it have never had one.
It's not as easy and just take them.
Luckily there is such thing as online schools now and that's what we do.
That way she's enrolled and if she does it or not it's better than paying double for her to be enrolled in one she refuses to attend.

He might have been able to manhandle you but is he able to get you to stay in a classroom if you are a bubbling wreck who is crippled with anxiety?

How does he get you from one classroom to the next? Loiter in the corridor all day?

You really don't understand anxiety, I know a girl who is struggling with it not just with school but hobbies too, really wants to go but the actual group gives her anxiety causing lots of stress for both parents.

My dd spent her days at home sleeping, teaching herself crafts, reading, painting and writing essays on things I set her. Your post is a ridiculous generalisation. I'm also a teacher who has engaged with a lot of kids with EBSA. Any post that suggests there is a universally true reason / cause is wrong.

They definitely were there 10-15 years ago! I started my career in education some 23 years ago and back then they were called “school phobics”. Awful term. (Not sure school refusers is much better. That’s not the term we prefer to use).

Yes Covid has had a huge impact. Mental health was on a downward turn before that. Lots of unmet needs. Academisation of schools who now are very target driven. Rigid behaviour policies. Funding cuts leading to schools having to cut their pastoral staff. The rise of social media and children being unable to switch off. There are a plethora of reasons.

I would say a huge proportion of the children I come across who are experiencing this have ASD or at least some traits of ASD (this is just my experience, I’m not quoting any statistics here). Busy, noisy, target driven mainstream schools can be utterly overwhelming. I do think things need to change. Academisation of schools and access to SM platforms at too young an age are the biggest mistakes of our generation. We have failed our young people.

But, they have always been there. There’s just more of them and more attention on them now. Rightly so, because they were swept under the rug before now.