Persistently Absent from School, A Parent’s Perspective

‘Persistently Absent from School’ has been in 2024, a national headline. Back to school ‘anxiety coping strategies’ were recently featured in a BACP email with links to blogs and articles. Yet should we be so quick to ‘help’ children back to school?

Do we truly understand what lies beneath a child’s anxiety at returning?

What are we solving - if we are even solving - in helping their return?

In addition, are we in some instances retraumatising?

Should we as adults and most particularly as therapists, be extending ourselves more to see the wisdom of a child’s somatic and psychological reaction to their school experience?

I write my thoughts as a parent who purposefully and with the consent of her ten-year old son, withdrew him from the education system because it was failing him on so many levels. It is important to note, the school headmaster at the time agreed that he and his teachers could not meet my son’s needs.

Withdrawing him from school coincided with finishing my counselling diploma. Prior to finishing, there had been in my counselling classroom, in-depth discussions about whether withdrawing children from school was a form of abuse. A similarly heated discussion raged about whether sending children to boarding school was also a form of abuse. There were strong feelings and varied opinions expressed by the adults in the room, but no one seemed to have formed their opinions from talking (age appropriately) with samples of the children concerned.

With these classroom discussions at the fore of my thinking, and to provide a new supportive social environment and the opportunity to forge friendships for both me and my son, I started and facilitated a local home educators’ group. I ran it for four years and it supported about 45 families, some attending intermittently during those four-years. What I observed is what I want to share with you since I suspect that fundamentally things have not changed over time.

Anxious parents having found my home ed website, would call or email asking for help or advice on home education; most expressing their frustration at what they believed was a situation they had little or no choice in. All they knew for certain was that their child was struggling. As I write ‘struggling’ this seems a choice of word wholly lacking in detailed description for the distressing experiences I was being told about, some of which were: -

· Children were bullied by their peers and their teachers alike.

· Developing neurodiverse children were unable to understand the concept of school learning.

· Young adults were overwhelmed by the sheer size and population of senior schools.

· Children’s health conditions were being ‘overlooked’ as they moved from teacher-to-teacher.

· School travel arrangements were viewed as unsafe, of poor quality, and unreliable.

These were the children’s lived day-to-day-to-day experiences that wore them down and contributed greatly to their deteriorating resilience and downward spiraling mood.

On taking the decision to withdraw their children from the system, parents discovered they had a lot to cope with in healing and educating their child. Many discovered as I did, that they didn’t know their child at all from a learning/educating perspective, and if you don’t understand your child academically how are going to work with them on a personal teaching curriculum that works for both of you, and fulfils the required demand of all home educators – to be meeting the needs of their child’s academic requirements?

The first and most important thing I found myself explaining, was always to relax and enjoy the experience of learning together, to get to know your child from a position of curiosity, understand what their interests are academically, where they struggle, and what they want to achieve for themselves. The biggest observed revelation I want to share with you, is that every child that I witnessed who regularly attended my home ed group, changed dramatically in the first three months; quiet timid behaviour gave way to smiles and laughter, cautious embarrassment dissolved into humour, detachment morphed into friendships with children of all ages and their parents.

A lack of stranger danger awareness is probably the biggest issue I had with home ed kids, because after a while they would talk to anyone about anything and think not just that it’s ok, but that it was their right to share information, to have an opinion, to be listened to. They embrace a wider view of life and education itself, than the uniformity that school offered them. A few went back into the system, most particularly to take exams because they are not funded for home educators and are very expensive when your child is taking multiples.

Once removed from the system the government offers nothing by way of assistance to home educators. They don’t offer the funding a school gets per child, they don’t offer free exams that can be sat locally, they don’t offer resources of any kind; indeed the only communication a home ed parent is likely to get is a yearly official appointment to assess they are fulfilling their child’s education requirements (something the schools were often failing to do), with no factoring in, thought or mention to the child’s overall wellbeing.

Instead of questioning how we ‘overcome anxiety’ and provide ‘strategies’ to get children back into the system - often to struggle yet again to fit into rules and social norms that often leave them feeling reduced to Buber’s I-it - we as therapists, suspend trying to problem solve and instead provide the therapeutic space for children to feel listened to and accepted. To creatively help children to express their thoughts and emotions without feeling the need to offer solutions to sometimes unsolvable situations.

Perhaps it’s time for the counselling bodies to support petitioning the government to ask how it might actively support and fund home educating families with anxious children so that they might flourish alongside the system, accepting that children have a right to walk in our world during school time and not be shut away one size fits all, no listening or empathic understanding required at all.

Claire Shepherd
Tutor on the Advanced Diploma in Integrative Counselling. 

Written October 2024

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