You get to choose your hard thing

My parents wanted me to be okay and to learn, so they did what they were told was right to get me into school. Things like, 'don't let her watch TV or do nice things', don't make home too comfortable', make her get up and sit in her school uniform each morning'. Typing this, I can still feel the skirt digging tight, collar scratching, cuffs scraping, shoes rubbing – locked in a school uniform cage. Terrified, because it put me one step closer to school.

I limped on only as far as my second year of high school and left with no qualifications. But I'm the first person in my family to go to university, earned my PhD at 25, and later qualified as an Educational Psychologist. I think that shows grit: 'perseverance and passion for achieving long-term goals... maintaining effort and interest over time'. As does the fight my own daughter put up to never walk through that school door again. If there's one thing that girl has in abundance, it's grit. 

My mum told me recently that a turning point for her had been when she took me into school for a meeting. She said she couldn't believe the physical change in me. That I curled in like a terrified animal, and she could see the genuine and pure terror. Before that, she didn't get it. She didn't realise that I was experiencing such visceral fear.

Education professionals have moved on in how we conceptualise school refusal, redefining it as school phobia, and landing now on emotionally based school non-attendance/avoidance (EBSNA/EBSA). 'It's can't, not won't' is a phrase used to help people understand. But despite our renaming and reframing, I don't feel that day-to-day practice has moved on all that much. On the ground, parents are still often under immense pressure and intervention can remain heavily within child. When resources are tight and there are often few options or accommodations, there is still an assumption that this child should go back to school. And because of that goal, 'school refuser' can still feel closer to the reality.

The retreat from school

It's quite alien to me when people puzzle over EBSNA: as if it's incomprehensible why children might not want to go to school. With the sensory challenges, the social difficulties and anxieties, the exhaustion of managing the demands and interactions and touch, sounds, smells, talk, response, eyes on you and words coming at you not understanding what the other kids mean, why they're laughing, why the teacher seems so annoyed and everything feels wrong but you don't know why… I'm baffled by people who manage places like school with ease, even pleasure. 

There's a family I know who do everything, dance, martial arts, scouts, choir, any and all social events, and somehow I only recently had the epiphany that it's because they like these things and find them enjoyable, restorative, and fun, not stressful, overstimulating, and exhausting. How different folks can be. It makes me think of Boyce's The Orchid and the Dandelion, the beautiful neurodiversity as biodiversity model, and how we're not right or wrong, normal or pathologised, just all different as carrots and apple trees. 

Thanks to the internet, we're more informed these days about neurodiversity, school trauma, stress, and burnout. But many parents and professionals still report hearing the same advice as my parents did. The pressure on children and their families is enormous. And it still feels like, rather than accept there may be problems with school – the whole entity – a lot of time can be spent questioning what's wrong with the child and family. Questions of cause rarely seem to centre on school, and even if they do it's assumed without question that this child should go back.

When retreat from school is gradual, change rarely comes quickly enough to help. Or is enough. Adaptations aren't given freely. There are many high and costly hoops to jump through. Often we see a pattern where the child struggles, cracks appear, help is asked for, but the problem isn't bad enough yet, it gets worse, things may change but by then it's too late – the child is traumatised and burnt out. Or sometimes the retreat is sudden – or, more accurately, it seems so on the outside, when the mask of okay-ness suddenly crumbles.

'Touch the gate'

In her wonderful book, Your Child Is Not Broken, Heidi Mavir (founder of EOTAS Matters) describes a meeting where the teacher asks her to drive her son to school to touch the school gate, as a kind of exposure therapy. Her son suffered a fairly sudden burnout early in secondary. Heidi knows that touching the gate won't ever help because the problem is what is on the other side of it. 'I knew that,' Mavir writes, 'and I think Susi also knew that, but her painted smile and expectant look didn't give me any room to say no.'

I've been that kid. Been that parent. Had that meeting. Seen that expression. And, like Heidi, I've jumped through that hoop (or a very similar one) because if you don't it's even more your fault. And when Heidi tells her son he can trust her, he replies, 'I can't though can I Mum? When will you stop trying to trick me?'  

This kind of exposure therapy can't work. As Naomi Fisher says, you can't desensitise someone's fear reaction with exposure to a stimulus that is actually terrifying. Using exposure to desensitise a kid like me to school is a bit like taking someone frightened of dogs and trying to cure it by gradual and controlled exposure to a XL bully with rabies.

And isn't that part of the issue? We agree it's emotionally based in fear, but some professionals don't see that the fear is justified? For them there is nothing to fear, whereas for some people, there is. It hurts to be there. And maybe, to quote Keiran Rose, who said about his autistic experience, 'you don't have to understand, you just have to believe me'.

Some people link Covid to an increase in EBSNA, and that may well be true. But many of us see that reason differently. It didn't damage us. During Covid we saw a better way – smaller class sizes, remote education, less mixing and moving around, more personal space. Then all that was whipped away from us. 

A child who uses a wheelchair can't go up the stairs - can't, not won't. They use the lift. And if there isn't one, we put in a lift. We don't ask them to build up their arms and drag themselves up the stairs. They can't. Yet with EBSNA (and other mental health conditions), while it may be said, it doesn't feel like the 'can't' is always taken seriously. Messages can remain that these kids just need grit, resilience building, self regulation. 

The context

For families, the pressure from all sides is as invisible but present as the air you breathe. Parents and children generally encounter instant demands to return and keep up expectations of attendance, keep links, keep pressure on. And when the child can't, there is such judgment of parents. 'You must be too soft, boundaries aren't clear enough, it's separation anxiety'… and this happens to parents when they're already vulnerable. As a parent, you are exhausted, you are down and doubting yourself, and you are kicked. There is a lack of choice in our education system. For families who have a child that can't attend mainstream, they are often left without choices or options.

And despite our reframing as EBSNA, analysis of the problem and suggested solutions still often remain within child. Contributing factors are analysed. Factors such as screen time, for example, are often interpreted as part of the problem, as causal – a child is staying home to spend time on screens – not considering that this may be the result of school-related trauma and a coping mechanism and means of regulation for a burnout child in crisis (see Naomi Fisher for the role of screens). Interventions can be heavily skewed to within the child – it is for the child to learn to self-regulate, build resilience, and adaptations to the environment receive less focus. 

To honestly engage with families, we must address the elephant in the room – it isn't just this child who is struggling in a context that is otherwise fine, well-designed, and fit for purpose. The system is over-stretched, under-resourced, and lacking appropriate training and support from other agencies (see the EIS position statement of November 2024). But while we may at times admit it, it is not officially acknowledged. It may be said in the meeting, but it doesn't make the minute. So in practice, blame – or 'responsibility', if that is less emotionally laden – slides off the system and lands on the child and family.

It's not just the kids who can find school a hard place to be these days. I believe most of us in education now are familiar with the news that another colleague has been signed off with stress and isn't expected to return anytime soon. We all see daily news about teachers struggling in schools, their pain and frustration that there is no help to meet the needs of the children before them. The class teacher cannot do it all.

The difference in the experience of child and adult is in the power imbalance and the twisting of the right to education into an obligation to attend school. Imagine the stressed Class Teacher, Pupil Support Assistant, or Head Teacher at the GP in tears, to be met with the response, 'Well, you have to keep going, it's so important for your future, your career progression. How's it going to look if you're off with stress? Everyone else is managing, why are you any different? Think of everyone you're letting down. What if you lose your job? Think of your bills, your mortgage. If you are off, make sure you call in everyday, make sure you get back as soon as possible, don't forget we expect you back. Get up and dressed for it and try every morning. You just need grit.'

These messages are still being given to some of our vulnerable children. And their families. That needs genuine and serious reflection. How does that feel to hear? What may the ripples be from that message, and how far and how long do they travel?

What should be said instead?

'It will be okay'

'When a child is burnt out, it's alright to take a break. They need to recover.'

'Don't worry, you have options.'

'We can help you.'

Perhaps if nothing else, then at least, 'It's not your fault'.

Grit or compliance?

Angela Duckworth defined the psychological concept of grit as a combination of passion and persistence, with success not a matter of talent or innate intelligence, but of attitude, effort, enthusiasm, and consistency – 'passion and perseverance for long-term goals'. But those goals are the goals of that individual, not somebody else's. The passion they follow is their own, not their parents' passion, not their teachers' passion. Duckworth states this in her Hard Thing Rule – everyone has a hard thing they need to do, you don't get to quit in the middle, and you get to choose your hard thing.

How can you find passion in something you don't want to do? Following someone else's or society's demands? This is not passion. This is not grit. This is compliance – submitting to the demands, wishes, or suggestions of others. Or it's conformity – adjusting behaviour to be more consistent with the opinions of others or the normative standards of a social group. Our education system requires compliance and conformity, not grit.

There is a wide literature on the inefficiency of and damage caused by coercion, and the importance of choice and voluntary action for positive change (e.g. Kurt Lewin's work on managing change). We know that increasing pressure creates conflict, resistance, and resentment (see Sam Harris's interview with Daniel Kahneman for an interesting discussion of this.) And we know it can reduce motivation, a key ingredient of grit. So, all other things aside, the approach many still take to EBSNA is unlikely to work as it is built around applying pressure to children and families.

Now and next

Let's take the refusal out of EBSNA and truly accept can't not won't. Instead of trying to make them go and then trying intervention after intervention aiming to help them tolerate the intolerable, we could be truly child centered – consider what this child needs first to heal, right now. Positive experiences, recovery, screen time, rest, agency, and then what next?

If we're not making changes first, if we're not putting in the lift, how can we ask the child to just try harder? With persuasion, pressures, coercion, with ear defenders, time outs, self-regulation, five-point scales, is this in their long-term best interests? What are they really, deeply learning about life and their place in it from being in school in this manner? 

Covid showed us other ways, some in schools and some not. Remote education, for example, is now plentiful in the private sector, with many models from live online full days to 'pick and choose' courses. But often they aren't cheap. In Scotland, I-sgoil is a remote school offering interactive online learning (at home or as a hybrid model) for those unable to attend school.

It's not for everyone, but nothing is. And that's really the point. We need more choices within the current system, and to work towards a system that truly does value grit over compliance. 

Dr Jennifer McClay (CPsychol) 

Educational and Child Psychologist 

Wave Psychology