Amy's heart breaks as she wipes tears from the faces of her nine-year-old Rory and 11-year-old Leo.
The tears begin at home before school, then come again at the classroom door of their Melbourne school as little, grasping hands cling to their mother.
For parents across the country dealing with school refusal — a long term absence different to normal truancy — it's a daily battle that strains relationships, impacts careers and harms the prospects of kids who miss months or years of school.
"It's been an absolute nightmare," Amy says.
"It's really hard to see your kids distressed and trying to help them and advocate for them and not getting anywhere."
The problems facing thousands of kids like Rory and Leo were laid bare this week with the release of a bi-partisan Senate report into school refusal.
It found the school system was letting down this group of students, commissioned research to establish the numbers of school refusers and charged education ministers with delivering a national action plan in the next 12 months.
Helping schools 'better understand' students
The Senate committee made 14 recommendations, including extra subsidised mental health visits for young people, earlier interventions, and funding a "one-stop shop" support service providing resources and advice for parents.
It specifically recommended priority funding for School Can't, an online support group for parents whose kids have difficulty attending school.
School Can't is run by Tiffany Westphal, a social worker who balances employment and her own child's on-and-off school refusal.
There are currently 9,000 members of School Can't with another 1,600 on the waitlist — numbers she says show the demand for advice and support.
"Often families are given poor advice like making home boring or taking away things that make home attractive in order to make school more attractive, or to use force to get their child to go to school," she says.
"This approach leads young people to experience worsened mental health in our experience."
Ms Westphal says "school can't" is a better term than "school refusal" for the young people it affects — many of whom are neurodivergent or live with learning disabilities — as students can be so overwhelmed non-attendance isn't really a choice.
Inclusion is at the heart of Ms Westphal's advice to struggling parents as they battle to understand a new phenomenon with huge implications for their children.
"We'd like to see much earlier identification of school can't in children so that they're getting help and support earlier," she says.
"We would like to help schools better understand what the school-based stressors are that students experience."
That can mean recognising that neurodiverse kids may learn in different ways and require extra help to feel safe.
"Students with disability make up [about 75 per cent] of the children that our parents and carers are looking after," Ms Westphal says.
"We'd love to see schools that are more inclusive and schools that value diversity and schools that are meeting students where they're at rather than demanding they change to fit in."
Validation 'at last'
Parliamentarians who sat on the Senate committee made it clear school refusal was not a parenting failure.
"It's really important to understand that school refusal ... is not a behaviour issue. It's not caused by poor parenting. It's a stress response that's triggered by something in a young person's environment," Greens senator Penny Allman-Payne says.
Ms Westphal says that stigma around parenting can be a barrier to reaching out for support or advice.
"There's still a lot of shame, because for so long it's been conceived as a parenting problem, parents are reluctant often to seek help," she says.
While the phenomenon of school refusals initially gained attention after COVID-19 lockdowns, the committee heard the pandemic exacerbated, but didn’t create, a trend that was already on the rise.
Parents such as Amy say the pandemic just brought attention to what was a long-running problem of schools not catering to neurodiverse kids such as Leo and Rory.
As things stand, instead of finishing Year 6 with his mates, Leo will be going to a private high school next year.
His little brother Rory is struggling too and only attending Year 3 classes for a few days a week.
"We have to go outside of the system to get any kind of access to education and I find that really upsetting because [Leo] is really bright. He's an amazing learner," Amy says.
For families that feel they've struggled to be heard, the Senate report was a landmark moment they hope will deliver lasting change for the next generation of students.
"It's been a long time coming but it's really nice to be heard and to be validated and to have some attention on it at last," Amy says.
"Until every child is welcome at school and every child is made to feel safe at school, we're failing."
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2023-08-11 20:21:04Z
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