(Not going) back to school: Inside the UK’s epidemic of school refusers

> Once, children who didn’t turn up at school were dubbed truants, their records were marked and parents were punished. But today, more than a million children and teens are persistently absent. Chloe Combi talks to them and their parents and asks how we got to a place where **nearly 20 per cent of children don’t go to school**

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Unfortunately, this figure is correct

The UK is actively making problems for itself for the future. These kids should be in school come what may, and the majority of SEND pupils – those who do not get anything from mainstream education – should be in their own schools.

WfH parents also set a bad example to school children. If they see the parents are in the house for weeks on end, can’t blame them if they want some of that action.

Schools aren’t for everyone.

Home study can work.

Most kids like school and interacting with other kids.

But bullying is rife.

Classes tend to teach to the slowest in the class.

Homework would be unnecessary if the teachers didn’t keep endlessly repeating themselves.

Holding back pupils because resources are scarce.

The curriculum not encouraging thought as well as memory.

Stupid and unnecessary rules and regimens interrupting work.

The travesty of school uniforms.

Not streamlining pupils into what they’re good at but making them do every subject so they a) get fed up and stop learning all together and b) they hold others good at that back. ( Sports, woodwork,metal work,maths..).

There’s a lot wrong with schools for some pupils.

I hated school and did everything I could to make it hard for the system making it hard for me.

My daughter loved school, thrived, rose and has worked in education.

One size does not fit all,just most.

I’m finding it quite difficult to be sympathetic to a lot of the stories in the article tbh.

Having a tantrum because he doesn’t want to go to school?

Starting a riot because he got bored or didn’t understand???

I can sympathise with the girl and her family since they do seem to be trying to find a solution and are still trying to go to school.

But the boys’ stories seem more like they just don’t want to go and pay attention. It’s especially surprising since they seem perfectly aware of their behaviour but don’t really seem to try or even care.

Run a nursery, first hand professional opinion is a lot of parents genuinely are too soft and pandering to their children’s demands and hostile to any professional opinions that they perceive are challenging them.

We had a young parent recently, her 4 year old son had never been away from her longer than a couple of hours. Day 1 he tried to break everything, hurt everyone, scream cried. Called mum in to assist. She started shouting at us how we should just let him do what he wants, she took him out and last i heard she was going to home school him.

Had another parent say that her child said another child was mean to him and if it happens again or she sees it she was going to come back and ‘sort the child out’. The children was an autistic 3 year old. I wish these situations were less common then they are.

I was a school refuser, sort of. I struggled with energy and routines as a teenager, perhaps more than most, but I also found school to be incredibly boring and not fit for my needs, which sapped motivation.

I’d often just show up in the afternoon or skip days to do other stuff. But I used much of the free time I acquired to further myself and I highly doubt I would have had remotely as successful a career if I had spent those hours in school bored out of my mind.

Mainstream school just isn’t for everyone frankly, and we need to be better at unlocking other pathways. Lots of young people have a wide range of issues which serve as barriers to their participation, but if we find ways around that there’s a lot of smart productive people.

I’ve been working in a program that engages NEETS with lots of great success stories over the past few years, and it’s clear there’s a lot more that can be done to help young people, especially since COVID is still having a knock on effect.

What’s interesting here is that other countries are seeing similar increases, only an order of magnitude smaller. I don’t think British parents are uniquely soft or spineless compared to their continental counterparts, so it must be something that’s uniquely British. Is there something in the school system here (other than maybe austerity) that can be looked at?

There’s easier ways to avoid school.

Getting yourself expelled repeatedly, skipping classes immediately when chance etc.

Again this is both a mixture of personal and parental responsibility and both should face consequences for this .

I don’t think our schooling/school system is good enough.

It treats all kids as if they learn the same way and all have similar life goals. It disregards children who aren’t able to learn in a traditional classroom setting so they just struggle along or give up entirely and pushes them towards further education which is un-motivating when that’s not what you want.

And there isn’t enough support for children who are neurodivergent, have mental health problems, or have learning disabilities (that’s if they can get an assessed for these in the first place) so again they struggle along and burn out or just give up.

I was a school refuser, school left me exhausted, stressed, and burnt out. It ruined my mental health. It shouldn’t be that way but sadly it looks like not much has changed since I left. And I know not all kids have that experience, but one kid feeling like that is too many.

I work with kids who don’t / won’t / can’t attend school. In my experience, only around 10% of cases I have worked with can attributed to poor or lazy parenting. Most these kids have some form of special educational need, lots are on waiting lists for assessments or support from CAHMS – services are not fit for purpose right now.

It’s easy to blame parenting, but it is not as simple as just “making” them go. For some young people the school environment is so overwhelming that they genuinely can’t cope. Schools can be very scary and uncompromising places – especially given how underfunded they are and how little training teachers have around SEN.

Even when a parent is appeasing their child by not pushing attendance, it can be understandable, especially if they are a single parent with no support. How is someone supposed to get a dysregulated child who is larger than them out of the house to school. Even a very young child can injure a parent or even make a false accusation.

I had an issue with my daughter and she refused to go to school.

But it was from utter relentless bullying. The schools were crap and did very little about it. Their answer was to isolate her from the rest of her class, peers and the few friends she had let her out a bit early.

Then the victim blaming “it will toughen her up” “kids are just like that just ignore it” “their not like that at home” “oh she must have done something”

After a big the panic attacks started. I felt powerless each time we took her to school it felt more like a march to some sort of twisted punishment.

Finding the suicide note was the final straw.

So we removed her from the school moved house and started therapy. Moved to a new school.

That however did not really work. More panic attacks. More stress.

The last choice to us was home school. And even that took some effort to get started. It is not easy and takes a monumental amount of effort to pull off well.

Some kids can be fracking cruel.