Navigating school attendance difficulties
If your child is having trouble attending school regularly it can be hugely stressful for parents and carers as well as for the child or young person themselves.
Schools often send out standardised letters at certain levels of attendance and this can add further to a sense that the child and the parents or carers are in trouble or being blamed. Terminology around these difficulties such as “school refusal” imply that children (and parents or carers) are consciously able to choose whether the learner goes in to school or not. This implies that not being able to get into school is a chosen behaviour and yet it would be more helpful to understand it as a sign of how challenging it has become for the learner and to consider what supports are needed. If the help the child needs are not put in place, it can turn into educational trauma or into school phobia whereby any thought of going to a formal education setting is so painful that at even changing schools may not help.
From our experience, we highlight a few areas for families to consider:
For parents, we suggest finding someone non-judgmental and supportive to talk things through with. In a stressful situation it can be hard to think clearly and being able to share the anxiety and worry with a supportive other can help to lower the stress levels and be able to plan ahead and manage oneself in among the difficulties.
Through talking without judgment with your child, try to build a sense of what is happening for them. Reasons why some of our clients’ children have struggled to attend school include missed sensory needs and sensory distress, anxiety about particular subjects or activities, missed support needs, school work feeling too hard or too easy, difficulties with certain teachers, or feeling the peer group is not right, bullying or a combination of all or some of these. It can help to write down all of the issues in order to start working on them one by one.
Ideally, by this point, there would be someone supportive at school that parents and carers can talk to in order to start resolving the issues and putting the needed support in place. If this is the case, we suggest being flexible about which days and sessions the young person feels able to attend and working gradually to attend where it feels possible. Starting with what your child is able to do in terms of attendance is usually best and then seeking to go at their pace in terms of building attendance and troubleshooting as you go.
Sometimes, families find that schools are not able to provide the adjustments, flexibility and support needed. Schools can seem defensive and inflexible if they are not able to provide the needed adjustments. This can be due to the shortages of funding, and not entirely within their control, although for families and the child it can feel like a betrayal.
Where schools are not able to provide the support needed, and where children or young people are not able to be in school, wherever possible we recommend trying to keep education going in some way. Local authorities in the UK are actually required to provide equivalent provision to that in school where a child is not able to attend for more than 15 days. It can be worth exploring this and where some support or provision can be made available we recommend trying to keep some sort of educational and mental health support going if at all possible.
If you are struggling to support your learner and need support and advice do contact us. We support learners who are not able to attend school or college with specialist mentoring, tutoring to maintain academic progress as well as mental health skills and therapy support. With our individualised programmes even when learners have been out of education for long periods we have supported learners to transition to full time education. Get in touch with us to find out more about how we can help. We also offer low cost talking therapy for parents and carers with therapists that undertstand the parent and carer challenges in supporting learners with additional support needs. Find out more