We're Making Things Worse

We need a new approach to school refusal

When I started working with children who weren’t fine at school, I was surprised by what parents told me they were told to do by professionals. It didn’t seem right – were they really being told that they should make home less pleasant for their children if they weren’t happy at school? Could it really be that parents were being told that they must force children into school against their will, sometimes for months or years on end? Was it actually happening that parents were being told not to interact with their children from 9-3.30 if they didn’t go to school that day?

Unfortunately, it turns out that this is exactly what was happening. Not just a few parents, but a torrent of them told me that they’d had this advice. I found books written by mental health professionals which advised parents to ‘show your children that you’re the boss’ or ‘aim for an atmosphere of solitary confinement during the school day’.

As a mental health professional myself, the advice seemed risky. It has the potential to do harm. Make an unhappy child unhappy at home as well and you can push them towards depression. Repeatedly forcing a child to go somewhere against their will can lead to despair and hopelessness. And not interacting with a child because they haven’t gone to school? That’s just cruel. It leads to distress for the whole family.

And as a former ‘school refuser’, the advice horrified me. For I remember what it was like to be ‘not fine in school’ and I remember that it was awful. Being expected to go somewhere every day where I felt alien. Wondering what was so wrong with me that I didn’t just get on with it like everyone else. And feeling stuck in limbo – if I went to school I felt terrible, but if I stayed at home nothing happened. Feeling that my life was going nowhere, but that the only way to change that was go to back to school. Back to a place which I hated.

That was in the 1990s, but things had got worse since then. My parents were not threatened with fines or court. I was not excluded from the Prom or from awards days. There was no posters up on the walls about how school was the only way. Things had got worse, not better.

There had to be a better way, but it didn’t seem like any professionals were talking about it. So I started doing so myself. I got a lot of pushback. People told me that I was encouraging poor attendance and that I had no idea what it’s like to work in schools. They told me that kids were ‘just trying it on’ and questioning the premise that school is always the best place for a child was dangerous.

But I also kept hearing from parents who said, this really is happening. Our kids are unhappy at school, and we’re being told that the only solution is to make them more unhappy elsewhere. No one is looking at what is going on in our schools.

So I wrote a book about it. Not alone, because this is a complex area which needs a multi-faceted approach. I wrote it with Dr Abigail Fisher, a qualified teacher and educational psychologist, and Eliza Fricker, illustrator and mother of a child who was ‘not fine in school’. Together we brought together expertise in education, mental health, psychology and lived experience. We interviewed young people and their parents, teachers and professionals.

Some professionals were so scared about talking to us that they requested complete anonymity. Others withdraw their anonymous contributions just in case someone recognised them. They didn’t want to admit that they were moving away from the ‘attendance at all costs’ approach for fear that it might cost them their jobs. That really made me think that this book needs to be published. If professionals are scared to speak out, then something is up.

Our free book launch is on April 16^th. Please come and join us. Everyone will be sent a recording

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