School refusal must be addressed

Many Australians whose children grew up in a different era can barely comprehend the issue of “school refusal’’. As education editor Natasha Bita wrote in Inquirer on Saturday, a Senate inquiry into the issue will report in August on the links between rising rates of truancy and lower academic outcomes. The report needs to help trigger solutions. Last year, student attendance levels dropped to the lowest level on record after the number of missed school days doubled compared with the start of the pandemic. Students skipped half of all school days last year, Bita reported, partly because of Covid-19, illness and flooding in some states, including southeast Queensland. In 2019, students missed a quarter of all days. Teenagers in high school were likelier to skip class, with attendance levels falling from 69 per cent in 2019 to just 45 per cent last year. The problem affects both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students across a wide section of society, with more research needed into the phenomenon and the students affected.

School refusal, according to ReachOut Australia, an online mental health support service for children, differs from normal “wagging” because many students are too mentally fragile or emotionally distressed to attend school. Teachers and other staff in the field have found the trend has been fuelled by long Covid-19 lockdowns, cyber bullying and students falling so far behind in schoolwork during the pandemic that they have given up. It is often, but not always, allied with autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Alternative, non-traditional schools such as the Pathways schools in Queensland are helping some students rediscover responsibility for their own learning. The problem is too serious and widespread to ignore. It needs to be tackled from an educational, curriculum and social perspective, with sufficient support for the students and their long-suffering parents, who have found to their disappointment that encouragement, cajoling and threats are useless.