On "school refusal crackdowns", crisis, and lack of support

Systems do not exist in a vacuum.

I had my first panic attack in February 2015. The months around it are slightly fuzzy, but that moment is crystal clear.

I was in Year 9 at a girls’ grammar school, where I’d already nearly left the year before. My undiagnosed autism and ADHD were causing me to struggle significantly - I was being bullied and my mask was slipping. My anxiety was becoming more severe by the day and the pressure was rising.

The day it happened was because of a conflict I’d encountered with a teacher. He had made a comment the week before - I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was essentially joking about isolating me from the class because I was too talkative (read: hyperactive and impulsive). It was DT, a subject I struggled with immensely due to my undiagnosed dyspraxia, so there was no wonder I felt most on edge in it.

The day it happened was the breaktime before I was meant to go into his class for the first time afterwards. I had experienced shutdowns and even meltdowns before, but not panic attacks. I’d never felt that way, not being able to breathe.

Anyway, that first instance isn’t the point here. We thought it would be a one off. A week later, it became clear it wasn’t.

I started having them at least once a day, if not twice, sometimes three times.

The school didn’t really care.

In one instance, I was physically dragged from my classroom, pulled down a flight of stairs and left in the medical room without them notifying the first aid team, who found me half an hour later in an even worse state.

My pastoral team, who were meant to be the ones on my side, had decided I was faking. There were a handful of us experiencing mental health issues in my year - is there any surprise when we were at a girls’ school about to hit our GCSEs? - and this, of course, must have meant there had been some form of social contagion.

The issue was, their focus was supposedly on my education, but instead, it became harder and harder for me to attend school.

Some mornings I would get on the bus and find myself frozen in the bus stop outside. Some days I wouldn’t even get on the bus, having to go in at breaktime when it was quieter and I’d had some time to calm my system.

Some days I didn’t go at all.

In the education sector and the media, this is what they call “school refusal”. I would suggest that “trauma refusal” is often more accurate.

I loved being educated. Academia was my thing, something I knew I could do well. I (unknowingly) had special interests in several subjects, and was fascinated by the world and learning everything it.

The Education Secretary is now saying that headteachers should be going to children’s homes and making them come into school.

For many of us, our homes are our safe space. School, doctor’s offices, therapy rooms, and the outside world were too stressful; home was predictable. Somewhere that, whilst may still have significant difficulties with family or anxiety, you knew that school and everything that surrounded it wouldn’t be a part of.

As someone who desperately wanted to go to school, but couldn’t, having my headteacher turn up on my doorstep and force me into school would have increased that anxiety and trauma significantly, and I likely wouldn’t have been able to return to school again.

As a society, we have to have more empathy for young children with anxiety, autistic young people (diagnosed or not), traumatised young people and all young people who struggle with attending school.

They’re not difficult, they aren’t just acting out for the sake of it. It pains me immensely that we want to push trauma on children for the sake of a few days of learning, rather than taking the time to work out what they actually need, finding them the support and being genuinely invested in protecting their futures.

Without the earlier traumas and lack of identification of my multiple neurodivergences, there’s a huge chance I wouldn’t have fallen into crisis at fifteen. It’s been repeatedly identified that I experienced severe masking burnout.

It will always feel like an injustice to me. I continue to shoulder the trauma I experienced in a mental health unit and at school, because the systems that are meant to protect me didn’t.

The education system, the mental health system - they do not exist in a vacuum. They exist amongst capitalism, ableism, and white supremacy; our society’s lack of care and protection for neurodivergent and disabled children exists amongst those issues.

These discussions of school refusal also do not exist in a vacuum. They exist amongst a government that has severely underfunded children’s mental health services; the same government calling for these harsher measures.

There is nothing more heartbreaking as a young adult who has been through it than knowing it is not getting better for those growing up through those same systems.