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?

My brother died the year I started secondary school in the 80s. I used to get the bus to school, sign the register then go and hide in a garage I knew would be empty for the day. I got into trouble, but my mind was closed down, and I simply didn't care what happened to me. I did it every day for a couple of years despite the school and my parents making my life hell over it.

I home educate my kids now, and accept that my own experience played a part in that decision, although there were many other reasons for that choice also. I feel strongly that school refusal should be a right, but there needs to be a strongly regulated alternative, that ensures every child gets an education that works for them.

I am also a professional but my boss was a stickler for everyone being in the office - even when I explained what was going on. Then there was a change of bosses and a we reached crisis and the new boss was much more understanding and allowed home working. Then Covid led to everyone doing it and we got through!

My point was that the leaving age has gone up and up since free schooling started but it hasn't improved education or made lives better for many children.

I was a refuser in high school back in the 90s. No amount of cajoling or shouting or punishment would make me go in, it just upset me more. I was terrified of woodwork due to the loud machines, terrified of science experiments, scared of using an oven (although overcame that one as I did like cooking and baking). Terrified of being forced to speak in class or doing drama lessons and being made to perform. I had good friends and loved learning but these things made me avoid school and I didn't feel I could tell anyone as I thought I would just get laughed at and told I was being ridiculous.

2/3 of my children had 100% attendance until they couldn't cope any more (the other always managed mainstream education). Turns out we're all autistic. Once in specialist settings where my children's needs were well understood and appropriately supported my children's attendance returned to near 100%.

schools today are harsh environments. There's too much focus on academic results, not enough early intervention support, not enough TA/pastoral support, harsh punishment regimes in too many schools and children can't cope anymore hence why school 'refusal' is increasing imo. The gov need to invest more in our education system. It would solve a lot of problems imo but apparently they're too stupid to realise this.

I was able to work at home by teaching new professionals, rather than working client facing myself. Not my preferred option but it kept me in touch with the field.

Perhaps. Class sizes have been approx 30 for a number of years now though.

What screen addiction was there in the 1960s, when my brother was school refusing - Watch with Mother or Children’s Hour for an hour a day on a black and white TV?

I have come across many school refusers, and for every one, the reasons were there in black and white in reports, by independent professionals such as educational psychologists and speech therapists, who had done formal and informal assessments, and observed the child in class! They had specific learning difficulties, which meant they could not cope in mainstream classrooms. None of them school refused, when they were sent to specialist schools - they loved it, being in an environment, where they could cope, among staff who understood them!

In fact I had to cut down my hours because of what was happening and years later I have not been able to get back to complete full time even though I have offered/requested. I manage and it’s better for me but my finances took a permanent hit. And my marriage broke up in the middle of all of it though not directly due to school refusal. The ongoing turmoil of battles to get to school and the lack of support didn’t help that situation. My ex left early for work and left me to it. The ramifications go on for years.

The one thing that didn’t really seem to suffer from both my own school refusal my DD’s was our education! Maybe I’d be a professor by now if I’d only been able to enjoy school?

My children all thrived at grammar academically and then even more at uni.

But people here should listen to the struggles of parents explaining their own struggles and stop being so snide.

That was definitely the case for my (adopted) DDs when they were school refusing. DD1 would either hold on to her devices for dear life or throw them in a rage. (Whilst still refusing to get dressed.) I could make go when she was younger, but that ship sailed long ago.

Thankfully those days are well behind us now.

I have an almost school refuser. Autistic, like so many others, and in a brilliant school that has given us so much support. The senco decided to trust my judgement and has never once questioned my excuse for why we turn up late. For the first two years of secondary if he asked to phone home for a lift, his sna did and I came.

Because he isn’t forced, and he knows he can get away if it’s too much, he goes when he’s able. That’s most days. We’ve never hit the threshold (here it’s 20 days absence) for reporting.

The days when he couldn’t go, we gave him extra tlc and support. We had a rule that there were no screens before 5pm, so that held steady. But if he needed to spend a day under a weighted blanket reading kids books or immerse himself in Lego, we trusted that it was for the best. Other days he’d do his school work from home, and on the whole, once we took the pressure off, he was fair about it.

We did a lot of learning ourselves, found things that helped through trial and error, eliminated unnecessary stressors so that his resilience wasn’t used up on them. We listened, and supported him as he learned how to tell us what was going on. Gradually there were less upset tummies, and more concrete issues.

When he’s in school, he works hard. He’s bright, intelligent and he’s involved in clubs, activities. He’s popular and well liked by the teachers. He’s been on the school council, represented the school at various events, won awards. But there are limits to what he can do. Attending school every day is one of them.

As a senior, He can walk out of a class if he’s overwhelmed, and there’s a plan in place, of where he can go, so that he’s safe. The school has a zero tolerance policy on bullying which has made it so much easier to disentangle bullying from social deficits and then support him appropriately.

He gains a lot from his time in school - I’m still on the fence if it’s done more harm than good. He’s so happy and expansive on school holidays, but pulls in on himself during the term, and there’s an uptick in self harm. Some days I wish I’d had the courage to home educate him, but he’d have other challenges if we had.

We’re not in the UK, our the school system isn’t quite as brutal, but, even here, this school have been particularly phenomenal. They support him to be his best self, and have done a huge amount to protect his self esteem and self worth. I don’t think he’d have made it in another school.

There is a lot that can be done and it’s incredibly short sighted that a 21st century economy that depends on asd and adhd minds, is still served by a 19th century school model that was designed to create subservient worker drones. Lots of talented dc are getting damaged by their school experiences and in most cases there’s little more than collecting statistics done about it.

No I suspect back in the day parents just didn't know kids weren't in school.
Turn up for registration and bunk off.
Or get the kid whos walking the paper register to the office to mark you in.

And I think that's the huge difference. The knowing and knowing your parents will know.
Were back in the day many parents of school refusers just wouldn't have known.

Very difficult to seperate them

Ease of communication has had an impact. When I set off for school with no intention of going in I knew my parents would not get a call.

If you were off for a week you just took a note in the week after saying you had been ill.

Now we have electronic registers that flag up if a child is late / absent. Schools send SMS and make phone calls.

At my mother's funeral the VI form left a message on my brother's phone that his youngest wasn't in class. Well no, she was attending her grandmother's funeral.

My DD was a schooler refuser, she point blank refused to go to school for her final 2 years. I tried everything to get her to go. The idea she was playing truant or being angry or naughty, is laughable, quite frankly. She barely left her bed for 2 years. She just completely shut down and became unresponsive, it was the most heartbreaking of times. My formerly bright and bubbly little girl was dealing with major anxiety and the only way she coped was by removing herself from all interaction. I’d go in and sit with her and I’d chat but half the time she was simply under the covers, not hiding, just a limp blob. We had a team of people trying to help; made up of cahms, her school, a local school officer, a community outreach programme officer and us parents, we met every month and discussed action plans etc.. No one helped very much but that was down to DD, it wasn’t through lack of trying. DD eventually agreed to go to a community college where she knew no one, she could go in and not speak to anyone and then just leave, she eventually got some qualifications and moved to a regular college where iher attendance was a concern but she’d go in sporadically, she’s an intelligent girl and was happy to do the studying, so she got decent grades at A level. She’s now at an RG university in her first year, at age 20. She’s periodically wracked with anxiety but she’s a wonderful young woman and so brave to face situations where she’d prefer to just run away and hide. Her father and I aren’t bad parents, we aren’t soft, passive, lenient or uncaring parents, we will never give up on her. Refusing school isn’t the end of any chances she’ll have, in the past anyone in that situation would’ve been written off by the system and keft to rot.

You don’t need them for GCSEs.

there’s videos of the ones you have to see as during Covid practicals were not permitted and the exam boards sorted this out,

at a level there is a practical component and homeschoolers can book on a week away to do them.

There was a boy in our class who was rarely in, he had a chaotic home life. Once the teacher was giving him into trouble for something in Primary and he just grabbed his stuff and stormed out. He recently passed away and I was quite sad to hear it as I’d met him as an adult and he was actually a decent bloke.

a colleague of mine didn’t have any formal education as he stopped going to school. His Dad was an alcoholic and never made him go. He was really smart and lovely. He said he went in one day and the teacher said ‘what are you doing here?’ So he left and didn’t go back. This was all in the 90’s. Just because it didn’t happen where you went to school doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Ah yes examined practicals were only there for a-levels. I remembered now.

That sounds more like lazy uninterested parents than actual school refusal.

But the one thing that is ringing throughout this thread is undiagnosed ASD and or ADHD.

What can the UK do for mainstream schools to be more ADHD and ASD friendly?

Do other countries / school systems have less school refusal, what are they doing differently?

What is it in UK schools that is making them so over whelming for kids?

While we have the school refusers, there must also be kids who come home, exhausted by the school day and stressed out by the whole thing

My ds was a school refuser from Y3, by the time he got to secondary school his anxiety was through the roof. He was badly bullied by one boy who would damage his property, things like the first day he had gone to school with a new backpack the boy had a blade & cut the straps on his bag, the school's attitude was what do you want us to do about it? Never mind the boy had a blade sharp enough to cut through thick webbing straps in seconds, this boy taunted, threatened, assaulted ds & the school did nothing, I even got my MP involved. When they started in Y10 the boy & his family moved away very quickly after his older brothers was arrested & found guilty of raping a woman in broad daylight not 5 minutes from where he lived, but not even knowing that he wasn't there helped ds confidence in school. It took him finding his own tribe of friends, ironically they were all the kids who had been bullied, didn't feel like they fitted in, his attendance improved, it still wasn't as high as school wanted but he went from 60% attendance to 85% he should have taken his GCSE's in 2020 but covid happened, he got good results despite his lack of attendance. He started sixth form & did his first year of A levels but as he was starting Y13 he got so depressed & anxious he just made his mind up he wasn't going back, I fully agreed with him, no pieces of paper with grades are worth ruining your mental health over. He spent 2 years doing things that interested him, getting more involved with the Green Party, acting as a social media manager for a candidate, campaigning etc, he became a trustee for Sheffield Young Carers a charity that had supported him from being 8 & indulged in his passion for transport travelling on trains around the country. When he was 20 he applied to university to do a 5 year course with a foundation year in Urban Studies & Planning, he absolutely loves it, he aced his foundation year & is doing really well in his first year of the degree. Not going to school doesn't mean no future, square pegs can't fit in round holes, our education system is too rigid with narrow parameters, sometimes kids need to find their own pathway.

12 months of my teen in severe autistic burnout here and can sympathise. I don’t think people who haven’t experienced their child in that traumatic state truly understand. Hugs x

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.

They certainly existed 40 years ago,

No I suspect back in the day parents just didn't know kids weren't in school. Turn up for registration and bunk off.

Or not even bother to turn up for registration. Then at some point during the day they would to be picked up by the police for being out of school. You would get a phone call to come and get them. Very embarrassing when the calls were taken by your employer and passed on to you. No mobile phones.

I've got a sibling who refused from the age of 12 back in the 90's. How exactly do you make a child who has barricaded themselves in their room come out and go to school if they are refusing to move? My mother couldn't exactly drag him out of the house, he was twice the size of her.

She didn’t want to go out either. She wanted to be with her friends and be ‘normal’. I know homeschooling would have been a total disaster for her, the more time she spends with others the better she is. She still needs lots of downtime afterwards but it really helps.
she was also offered hospital school but refused as she wouldn’t know people.

The thing that made it most difficult for us is we did get 1:1 time which she would go in for. There was also a supportive classroom for children who were struggling, but it ended up being full of disruptive kids when they didn’t know what to do with them.
If it had been what it was meant to be, I would have gotten her in more much earlier on.

Ten years ago was 2016 and there were posts then on mn from parents about their dc who they could not get to school.

It's not new though, as pps have said, the schools, LAs etc used to be less bothered. I went to school with people who were barely ever there, they weren't ill, they just hated school. Dh didn't go for the final few months of year 11 and that was 20 odd years ago. He didn't like being there, his parents had meetings with the school but as he was on course to do well in his gcses they agreed he could just stop going and nothing more was said or done about it. That would not happen now!

I definitely think its a change in attitude. Its noticed, kids aren't just being written of.

Its not individual schools problem its a society problem. What can be done with schools to make them more inclusive?

And I don't mean just mean special units. I mean what can be done with mainstream schools to make them better other than ditching stupid blazer rules.