School attendance, and the other side of the same coin, school refusal / school avoidance, are increasingly discussed in the news, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns.
The statistics are startling. As reported recently by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, basing her figures on Department for Education data:
“Persistent absence, defined as missing more than 10% of lessons, more than doubled from 8% of primary and 13.7% of secondary school children pre-Covid across England to 17% and 28% respectively in 2022-2023.”
In a recent seminar on this same issue, Vicky Saward, Head of Schools Training at the Anna Freud Centre, confirmed there is a real problem with school attendance and gave lots of details. The problem persists even when taking into account the time missed in recent years due to Covid-related issues (children being poorly, or having to isolate). Considering that historically the UK has had high levels of school attendance, when compared to other countries, clearly we are now dealing with a changing picture.
Why and how are children and adolescents avoiding school today in such high numbers? How do we understand the problem, and how do we resolve it?
To make matters more confusing, even agreeing on the correct terminology is a challenge, as the terms used for problems in school attendance keep changing. From the old-school ‘school refusal’, we then moved to ‘school avoidance’, with the term ‘truancy’ lingering on in the background unchanged.
Nowadays, the officially preferred term is the mouthful ‘emotionally based school avoidance’, a term aiming to encompass a broad spectrum of issues. This term is trying to underline that children miss school not because of defiance, but for emotional reasons. But it seems, as a term, to be jumping to conclusions about what’s going on and making assumptions about a range of phenomena that are far from clear. As a term it seems equally problematic to its polar opposite, ‘school refusal’.
In the first concept (emotionally based school avoidance), the young person is pictured as having problems they can do little or nothing about. In the second (school refusal), the young person is pictured as fully in control of their decision not to go to school. Both concepts paint half a picture. So I prefer the neutral term ‘school avoidance’ that leaves room for individual variation.
Regardless of the terminology, what’s important is to understand the different issues these terms try to capture.
Recently I came across a simple, clear categorisation of three distinct groups of school
avoidant children and adolescents, as described by Jean Murray, a psychoanalyst and child and adolescent psychotherapist in Belfast. Murray’s distinction draws on Anna Freud’s early work, and offers a helpful lens through which we can understand these problems. And from there, we can start addressing them.
Group one of school avoidance …
…includes young people who we could loosely describe as ‘truants’. These are the kids who ‘bunk off’ school, engaging in ‘antisocial or delinquent behaviour’, often ending up in Pupil Referral Units or permanent exclusion. They are (unhelpfully) described by schools as having ‘behavioural’ rather than ‘emotional’ problems – as if the two can ever be fully separated!
Despite the concern and alarm these young people evoke, psychoanalyst and paediatrician D. W. Winnicott (1956) insisted that their delinquency is a sign of hope. There is force in defiance, something active being communicated, which needs to be heard:
“the delinquent is adamant that the environment must make something up to him”.
Moving to the second group…
…these are young people who gradually or suddenly develop a phobia of school. Or they come to fear and avoid specific aspects of the school experience: eg lunchtime, certain lessons etc. The school phobia usually manifests in physical symptoms, with the body taking the lead in the suffering: headaches, stomach aches, dizziness, vomiting. Or panic attacks coming out very physically, with shaking, breathlessness, or even fainting. The physical symptoms thus become a concrete manifestation of the underlying distress: the nausea turning into vomiting, or the panic attack making it very hard to stay in class.
This second group of school avoidant children and adolescents can be confused with …
… A third group that may be harder to spot
These are young people who are reluctant to go to school due to (often unspoken) concerns about what’s going on at home. Or it could be due to implicit pressure from the parents who need them to stay at home. The reasons vary: violence at home, parental illness, or more subtle difficulties that keep the child worried about what’s going on at home, and thus not able to focus and be confident in school.
There are many symptoms shared with the second group, but here the suffering tends to have a more symbolic and less physical expression, while in the second group the difficulty tends to be directly somatic.
There are of course individual differences and overlapping themes. But this three-part grouping offers a good starting point in thinking through these difficulties and considering where to focus when thinking of solutions. So, I want to thank Jean Murray for her ideas!