'I couldn't even spell my own name': The kids who fear school
“I get a bit upset when I don’t make it to school. I really want to, but somehow I don’t know how to get there.”
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Frieda was still in kindergarten when the tantrums started.
Her mum Alice would be forced to drag her daughter to school, kicking and screaming, before school staff restrained the then five-year-old as they locked the door behind them.
“If tough love worked, my child would be at school,” Alice told the ABC.
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“The things we put her through … I’m ashamed of it.”
Alice is part of a growing demographic: parents who can't get their child to go to school.
“It’s a really lonely, confusing and shameful world because you assume that you are the problem,” Alice said.
“You see other families with kids just happily going to school, and you feel like you’re just in this complete other world.”
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"I really want to go, but I don't know how to get there"
Frieda, who is now eight, is one of the thousands of Aussie children who have difficulty attending school due to emotional distress.
The ABC reports now two days are the same for Frieda. Some days she’ll go to school and last all the way to the 3pm bell, other days she only makes it to the school gates, while other days she can’t leave home at all.
“I get a bit upset when I don’t make it to school,” Frieda said. “I really want to, but somehow I don’t know how to get there.”
In 2023, attendance rates for students from Year 1 to 10 was 88 per cent, down from 92 per cent in 2013.
38 per cent of students were absent for more than 20 days in the school year.
The ABC reports a lot of parents and experts are now referring to the phenomenon as ‘school can’t’ rather than ‘school refusal’, because the child literally can’t go.
Experts say the reasons for ‘school can’t’ can vary from problems at home to health issues to neurodiversity.
“We know that there are certain groups that are more at risk than others … they may be autistic, they may have learning difficulties, ADHD. They may have anxiety or some other mood disorder,” Dr Lisa McKay-Brown, an education researcher at the University of Melbourne, told The ABC.
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"I couldn't even spell my name"
Ethan, 12, became so disengaged with school that he still couldn’t read or write in Year 3.
“I couldn’t even spell my name,” Ethan told The ABC.
His mum Sam knew the reason once she saw how her son was treated in class.
“Instead of sitting there and writing a sentence like the other children, they just said ‘oh, just draw a picture’,” she said.
“It pushed him further away.”
Covid made matters worse for Ethan, who struggled to adapt to online learning.
When students returned to classrooms, Ethan struggled to keep up again, and eventually began having physical outbursts while experiencing bullying.
He eventually told his mum he would self-harm if he was forced to go.
“It wasn’t safe for me,” Ethan told The ABC. “I got bullied every day. It made me feel like I was locked up in a cage.”
When his public school told Sam they were out of options for him, she added Ethan to a 100-person long waitlist for a special school that helps youth who are disengaged from mainstream schooling.
The ABC reports the months have slipped by while they wait for a spot.
“No child left behind is definitely not a reality,” she said. “Ethan was left behind.”
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"I had my parents coming in yelling at me"
When Kurt’s 16-year-old daughter Hayley couldn’t get out of bed to go to school, the legal threats started rolling in.
The school eventually threatened the family with an $11,000 fine if she was unable to attend regularly.
“I had my parents coming in yelling at me,” she told The ABC.
“I got the lights turned on and the blinds opened, the bed sheets were pulled off, stuff like that.”
Eventually it dawned on Kurt, who works as a mental health nurse, that his daughter had depression. He also noticed scars on her arms.
“The school stuff was hard, but the stuff where you cry yourself to sleep sometimes is having a child doing that themselves … and working in the industry knowing what the outcomes can be,” Kurt said.
Kurt, a single-dad of two, was left fearful of the potential legal ramifications, but he was eventually assured by Hayley’s school that he wouldn’t be fined.
“We started talking to the deputy principal and she was excellent,” he told The ABC. “She put a plan in place with Hayley.”
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"I don't know what our lives look like next week, next month or next year"
For Alice, she has considered homeschooling, but just can’t afford it.
Instead, she moved Frieda, who has been diagnosed with autism, to a school where staff are more accommodating, and her attendance has improved.
The ABC reports despite the improvement, Alice still received a formal warning about Frieda’s attendance, and a second would trigger contact form a homeschool liaison officer.
“The principal did explain it’s just how the system works, and it doesn’t need to be a scary thing as they may have more resources … but if I didn’t have the heads up, I would have been terrified,” she said.
“When you get something like that … it’s got a shaming tone. Like you’re failing at this, you’re failing because your child isn’t going to school all the time.”
She told The ABC she had a particular issue with the NSW Education slogan ‘Every School Day Counts’.
“How insulting. Of course we want our kids to be going every day,” she said.
“They were putting [it] back onto the parents, it’s our fault … instead of ‘school attendance is tanking, so is numeracy and literacy’ and the department isn’t prepared to go, ‘Maybe it’s a problem with the system’.
Alice said that while Frieda has had little wins over the past 12 months, there was no guarantee things would keep improving.
“I don’t know what our lives will look like next week, next month, or next year,” she said.
“As a parent, that’s pretty awful because all you want is for your kid to be happy.”
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"Ethan's been given a chance"
After six months, Ethan got a place at MacKillop Education, a private school that helps students get back on track.
With only 80 students and class sizes capped at eight, Ethan got the attention he required to improve his schoolwork.
“He would bite or pull his hair and he would say, ‘I’m so dumb’. That’s the thing that upset him most, that he thought he was stupid,” Sharyn Sadler, Ethan’s support teacher, told The ABC.
“There was a fear of failure, which is common amongst many of our children because they’ve experienced so much failure.”
After two years at MacKillop, Ethan’s attendance is now full time, and he can read fluently and spell.
He is now back at a ‘mainstream’ public school with additional support.
His mum Sam acknowledges how lucky her son is.
“Alternative schools like this, they’re not as easily accessible for kids who need them. You have to go through so much trauma, so much anger. The child has to go through so much themselves to even be put in the position to access a school like this,” Sam says.
“Ethan’s been given that chance, and he’s really grown with it.”
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"I've been doing as much as I can"
Not every child’s path is so straightforward.
The ABC reports Hayley’s attendance improved to 85 per cent last year in a program for students with chronic attendance issues that employs interest-based learning.
However, she’s had setbacks this year with her mental health.
“Sometimes I’ll be going great for a few weeks or months or even a whole year, but then stuff will not be going as great again, and then my attendance will go down again,” she said.
To help her stay engaged, her program allowed Hayley to wear headphones in class to block out distractions. She also attends a local school for art class four days a week.
“I’m actually doing things. Talking to people instead of staying in my room, trying to get to school,” she told The ABC.
“I want to be able to get through year 11 and 12 and get into uni to study psychology. So I’ve been doing as much as I can to get there.”
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