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?

Well yes. 1972 was the last time the age changed in England (I'm not going to count that vague education or training nonsense for 16-18).
Perhaps it shouldn't have been. Some people just can't cope with school.
If they could legally leave they would.

This happened at my school in the 90s

A mix of:
Schools have got worse
Children's mental health has got hugely worse
There's more emphasis on attendance than in the 90s
Parents/adults are less likely to use violence or threat of violence to get children to comply

They did exist. One of my niece's friends got "school phobia" and wouldn't go to school. His mum ended up home schooling him. Niece is now 28 so this would have been at least 15 years ago.

In our school, the number of school refusers exploded after covid. These children were often suffering from anxiety, had lost family members... A lot of them had very proactive parents, who were doing everything they could to help.

My sister was a school refuser. They existed.

The internet didn't though, so you didn't hear about them.

Covid has also done on a number on a lot of children too, not just because of the anxiety it has caused, but also in terms of school being seen as important, and also a habit.

Many of my friends stopped attending, walked out, didn't arrive, got no GCSEs

And what if they still don’t get up? What are you doing next?

That MAY work for a NT child who just doesn't want to go (with no other contributing factors) but can be actively harmful otherwise

And if they don't?

I have school refusing dc, all autistic, all issues before covid, which has made things worse.

1 was so overwhelmed and stressed with school that we couldn’t get near him, we would be attacked.
2 had fast declining mental health issues and school would do nothing to support them even though 1 had an EHCP. I recall the EWO hissing “just get him in” at me whilst holding documents outlining his diagnosis and the support they were meant to be giving. It comes to a point where it’s more important to support the child because if school is making them so ill it’s a no brainer to not physically force them in.

I was an autistic teen in school and miserable, but schools are far worse now than they used to be. So many more targets, more pressure, lots of schools are less formal so are noisier. Add in societal issues - more families where both parents work, COL crisis, people are more stressed.

Anyone who hasn’t been through this might struggle to understand, but I hope they stop themselves from judging.

I left school in 81 and knew one girl
who dropped out aged 15.
I was a bit envious as I hated secondary school!
My mum knew their mum and they said that they just couldn’t go anymore, so they didn’t because of mental health issues and fainting each morning , being sick and so on. She left with out any qualifications
My own mum was horrified. I was made to go , it was never an option for me not to go along to school.
I think there were probably many others who just simply stopped going.

I worked for both CAMHS and Social Services in the 1980s and 1990s. School refusal was not uncommon. Truancy ( often in a group and associated with getting up to mischief) was differentiated from anxiety based school refusal. Some children were avoiding things they couldn’t face in school and some were anxious about being away from home. With hindsight there was a lot of unidentified neurodivergence. It’s more talked about particularly on social media now and it does seem to have increased a lot but it isn’t something new. I had difficulty getting one of my own children into school for a while and with hindsight I don’t think I handled it well.

What is the difference, OP, in your mind between truancy and school refusal?

I assume it's the deception of the parents but do you not think then that if the current school refusers' parents did force them they would simply pretend to go and then leave again? Perhaps they prefer knowing where they are and that they are not wandering the streets.

"I would just not allow it" is a puzzling statement. There are plenty of things children are not allowed to do, that they do anyway.

Are you imagining that parents are just en masse going "Oh dear you don't feel like going into school? Never mind darling here is the XBox controller and the wifi code and a snack."

Gosh what great advice on this thread.

For all the people posting talking about their children who struggle and are ND, they should have just <checked notes> turned the WiFi off and handed them their uniform!

PSA: we have a school refusal solution! Which one of us should tell Ofsted?

‘school refusers’ have always existed. The amount of pressure and assessment for school children has never been higher as well.

1. I’ve worked with many people in a sector who are successful now but didn’t go to past 13/14 (they would be in their 60’s now). They hated school, stopped going and got themselves a job on a farm or something similar. It wasn’t legal then but parents weren’t concerned as their son had a job/wasn’t getting into trouble and the school or LA didn’t come after them. 2 Both my parents and my in-laws (in their 70’s now) left school at 15 with no O Levels or CSEs. They didn’t even sit any exams. School was a lot less pressured as there was no exam prep.
2. When I was at primary school (in the 80’s) there was no national curriculum or SATs. There wasn’t an overstuffed and dry curriculum. Teachers had more time to teach. At my school there was a lot more time for music, art and PE. We had a large playing field and if we were well behaved the teacher would take us out for a couple of games of rounders.
3. Secondsry schools seem to be so strict now with lots of fancy uniform. I was a quiet and shy girl from a council estate so often didn’t have the right équipement or had items to small or with holes in them. Now that would get you a day in isolation. There was no spare uniform or money to buy spare uniform so I would have had to stay home until my parents were paid before an item could be replaced.
4. Less Special Schools (which are much more difficult get a place in). If my son was born 20/30 years ago he would have attended a special school at 4. He is autistic, didn’t talk until he was over three years old and is developmentally delayed. He wasn’t dry during the day until he almost 5 (after years of trying to toilet train) and still cannot hold a pen properly. A friend of mine was sent to a special school when he was 4 because he had delayed speech (didn’t talk until he was 4) as his brother was severely autistic so the LA assumed he was as well! Once he started speaking and their school didn’t see any signs of autism they sent him to a mainstream school.

😂😂😂😂😂😂
Yeah that works.
My daughter would lie naked on the cold bathroom floor staring at the ceiling rather than go to school.

Yes. This was me in 1994.

If it interests you OP, I passed all my GCSEs at A* without any school attendance for two years, with a morning a week at a PRU. So turns out I didn't need to be in school after all. What I needed was an autism and ADHD diagnosis.

YABU. You are also being ill informed, bigoted, judgemental and inexperienced.

"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."

Just not true.

Apologies, maybe I have misunderstood the issue then? Kids were occasionally off sick, yes. I thought school refusers referred to repeated / sustained time off school, not a couple of days a year.

Schools used to monitor attendance back then as they do now (registration etc), and I would have noticed a child who was absent a lot. All but one of the schools I went to was a small school with 1 or 2 forms per year and everyone in the year group knowing each other. I am also 1 of 4, and as far as I’m aware, none of my siblings had any school refusers in their year either.

I was a secondary in the 90s and I know a girl I'd been at primary with was a school refuser at secondary. Don't know the details as it was a different school.

At my secondary school there were lots of kids who truanted. Wonder if they'd be classed as refusers now.

What is it with the “Id just tell them they have to” crowd - do they not want to admit they’d spend every morning physically hauling their teenage child to school? Or do they think they actually have the solution

My brother stopped going to school when he was eleven, the woman who brought about our birth dealt with it with physical violence. He chose regular physical violence over school as it was still the safer option for him.

My dad stopped going to school in the 60s as a teenager and started going to work instead. In the early 2000s I did similar. I went to college part time and work part time. So it is not a new thing.

School refusers have always been around we are just more aware of it now because of the pressure on schools to try and get them to attend.
When I started school I was able to start in the January instead of the September due to my age, this is not an option now so we are sending children in who are just 4.
Children are expected to sit still and learn, there are high pressures to succeed, SATs, rules where minor infringements mean children are sent to ‘reset’.
Lessons are regularly disrupted by behaviour from other children who probably would not have attended main stream classes ‘back in my day’.
Lack of TA’s, large class sizes all mean there is an undertone of stress.
My youngest is in Year 1, his class don’t have a classroom TA because the person who should be doing it is having to work with individual children in the class as 1:1 and there is no more budget left for anyone else.
I stopped working in a primary school because they aren’t the places they were even 10 years ago, if my children turned around tomorrow and refused to go in, I would see why and would try support them to look at other options ie homeschooling.
I certainly don’t think poorly of other families struggling to get their children to go, you can’t just drag them in kicking and screaming and why on earth would you want to?!