Chapter 9 - School Attendance and Anxiety

Summary

This chapter explores the importance of understanding the role of anxiety as a barrier to education from a familial, lived experience standpoint. The parental understanding of a child’s complex educational requirements should be better utilised by professionals across all teams to help personalise the best individual pathway for each child. To achieve this goal there needs to be a fundamental shift in the language we use around school refusal, and the implications of such language in the legal context of mandatory education. This chapter also incorporates the various impacts school-based anxiety can have on individual families, examines the legalities of anxiety-driven non-attendance and how wider policy aims are seldom reflected in practice within the current system. Lastly this chapter explores resources for educators, healthcare professionals and parents alike, which have been of personal benefit and which will prove invaluable in advancing the discourse and practice in supporting families dealing with school-based anxiety.