Education system needs overhaul to support school anxiety, psychologists say

(Press-News.org) The UK education system must urgently change to be more understanding of school ‘refusers’, as returning to school might not be the right outcome for some children, psychologists say.

While much has been made of school attendance figures in recent months, a group of experts are suggesting not enough attention has been given to the experiences of parents and young people experiencing school distress.

In a new book, What Can We Do When School’s Not Working?, a parent and two psychologists are urging educators working with children to change their outlook.

Abigail Fisher, a qualified teacher and educational psychologist, Naomi Fisher, a clinical psychologist and author, and illustrator and author Eliza Fricker, are calling on SENCOs, educational support workers, senior leadership teams and local authorities to accept that pushing children into school is not always the healthiest approach.

Naomi herself experienced school distress, and Abigail is her sister, with both going on to train as psychologists. Eliza is the parent of a child with school anxiety.

Naomi explains how hard it can be to experience anxiety around attending school: “My experience has shown me that when things are going wrong for a child at school, we tend to locate the problem in young people and their parents. We don’t think enough about what is happening in our schools.

“As a child, I had my own difficulties in attending school. I was called ‘school phobic’. Now we often say that children have ‘emotionally based school avoidance’ or EBSA. Both terms assume that the child’s reaction to school is the problem, rather than what is going on at school.

“I think we need to shift our perspective. The evidence indicates that many children cannot thrive and learn in the schools we have created for them.  We need to see our children’s reactions – both emotional and behavioural – as important feedback on the system and as an impetus for change.”

The authors have pushed back against recent conversations in the press and among policymakers about school attendance, including the term ‘school refuser’, suggesting it puts the blame on the child – tending instead to refer to children struggling with school attendance or school-based distress.

The book, which is informed by research, clinical practice and lived experience, aims to bring together diverse perspectives on school attendance and to offer different ways to approach this difficult and complex area with young people and their families. It also looks to give professionals insight into the experience of families and young people who struggle with school attendance.

“Young people who do not attend school lack opportunities to learn and are often told that they are failures or losers. These young people have frequently had very bad experiences at school, and may have learnt to think in ways which block their learning, for example thinking about themselves as worthless or as incapable,” the authors say. “It is a big shift to let go of school attendance as the primary goal and to consider what else might work for these children, but for some that is exactly what they require.”

The book comes amid Government talks of a clampdown on pupils missing school and a curriculum review to make school more appealing to pupils currently turned off by it, while some educators and parents are concerned that schools spend too much time on disengaged pupils, which is disrupting the education of those who want to learn.

The authors say that their book is aimed at schools and education practitioners in the hope that they will realise what children with school-based distress are experiencing and change their practice.

“Schools are where young people spend the majority of their time, and it’s where they do much of their growing up,” they explain. “They are learning just as much from how they are treated as from what they are being taught in their lessons.”

The authors cite a body of evidence showing that the more that schools try to change young people’s behaviour and learning with rewards and sanctions, the less young people will be internally motivated to behave well and to learn for its own sake. They also say that having heard from parents, these behaviour modification techniques also have an impact on some children’s self-esteem and emotional well-being, which puts some of them on a path towards school attendance difficulties.

“Creating psychologically healthy schools requires deliberate shifts on the part of educators and school leadership teams towards collaboration and relationships. It doesn’t just happen,” they explain. “It takes a brave educator to make that change, because the prevailing culture of education is that the focus should be on improving test scores, with many interventions being judged against this benchmark.”

The authors put forward a host of suggestions, from creating more psychologically healthy school environments that focus more on holistic wellbeing than attendance figures, utilising interventions for at-risk children such as collaborative open-ended projects or interest-based programmes. They also suggest that forcing children into school, making both home and school unpleasant, can cause chronic stress leading to severe burnout – in which case not returning to school and seeking alternative education is the best option.

“It’s not really feasible that school creates better outcomes for everyone, even those who are very unhappy or failing there. We know that attending school isn’t sufficient for a child to do well, because many children attend school for years and do very poorly at the end. The school building is not infused with magical properties. Not everyone can learn there and for some, insisting that they attend every day prevents them from learning,” they explain.

“As a society we are letting down the children who struggle to attend school. We are not providing them with accessible opportunities to learn – and consequently, they have poor outcomes. This perspective opens up new possibilities, namely whether it could be possible to change what happens when a young person struggles to attend school. The insistence that school is the only way to learn excludes many young people from education.”

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