Building a whole-school response to school avoidance

Brett Wilson

My name is Brett Wilson. I work with headspace Schools and Communities in the Be You initiative. My role here now is the Education and Stakeholder Advisor on a national level, and very excited to be here with you today to help facilitate a discussion around a really challenging, challenging experience that a number of you, or all of you in this room, would be having right now within your schools, and the prevalence of it continues to grow. I myself spent 16 years in education before I came across to headspace and have experienced quite complex situations of school avoidance as well.

I'll formally begin us off with an Acknowledgement of Country. I'm meeting with you from the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I'd like to pay my respects to their Elders past and present. This morning, in on the train, it's been quite a wet week in Melbourne, and it was really nice to see the new life that that moisture has brought to the green spaces around both the city and, and the area that I live, which is down in Boonwurrung Country. And it makes you think about how much that natural change in the environment with rain and, and weather would have been relied on by the traditional custodians of the land.

So, as a national initiative with national reach, we extend our Elders, our respect to Elders past, sorry, Elders and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people from all across the countries you're, the Country and land that you're meeting from as well, and we invite you to, celebrate that in the chat if you, if you can.

As I said, we're having a discussion today around a whole-school response to school avoidance. We're joined by two experts in the field that I will introduce shortly. And they can elaborate a little bit on their findings in this space, and hopefully shed some light on the situations that you might be dealing with, within your own settings, or you're supporting staff to deal with young people that might be going through some of the challenges that we will discuss today.

Just calling out, as we always do in our presentations, some of our content today might bring up some stressful responses in yourself, or some of your colleagues or peers, and it's important that we always acknowledge that, you're self-aware of that. If you need to step away, feel free, to do some self-care if it's triggered something in you that, that has created a stress response, and rely on your supports within your, support network, should you need to as well.

Be You, we are a national initiative that offers education or professional learning for educators, such as this afternoon. We provide resources that help with whole-school approach to wellbeing, including educator wellbeing, but also how to navigate wellbeing and support wellbeing within your school communities. As I'm sure a lot of you are aware, we've got a number of resources that would be helpful in situations like we're talking about today, but also beyond that as well. The whole-school approach means that you can address some of the concerns that you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis within your setting from many angles, and one of our key strengths is the access your school has to a Be You Consultant, and navigating some of those issues with our resources, and how to best fit those alongside with what your concerns are. Particularly around our conversation today, the resources on school avoidance that you can access through the website. We just wanted to shout out a few key elements to, to support you in this space.

So, we have fact sheets, fact sheets on early signs of school avoidance that you might be able to pick up, what factors might contribute to school avoidance, and strategies educators can draw on to support and address this issue.

We also have a previous webinar that was recorded that may be of interest to you as well. You can access that quickly through one of our Micro Learnings. So we've recently embarked on creating short snippets, bite-sized pieces of information that you can access there, and it's pictured on the slide. It's a 7-minute short, short piece of, short piece of information that you can extend into those webinars, like I said. Sophie has placed that in the chat for you, and links to the, links to the fact sheets as well, are also in there.

One of the key things that I think is, that we think is relevant to this discussion is the Return to School Support Plan, and, I'm sure your school has some version of this, and it, it might be more advanced than the one we have here, but this is a great starting point if you and your school haven't explored the need or, or the requirement of having one of these to support in these situations. It can be really comforting for both young people and families going through this process, but it's all about the timing of it, how it's managed, and the readiness of the family and young person as well.

This resource is a great example of what we will discuss in our workshop, so next week, we are running a workshop for leaders and wellbeing coordinators, year-level coordinators etc. And the goal is to get together with people in your state, in your sector, and discuss some of the practical implications of what you're doing in this space to support young people and families, and the educators in your settings as well. So you can scan the QR code, and I'll put this up again on at the end of the session, and there's also links to it in the chat as well.

Okay, that's enough from me in terms of, I guess the context with Be You. Today, we're joined by two, as I said, experts in the field. I'm going to introduce you, you to both of them before they start talking, so that we can flow through to the Q&A section as efficiently as possible.

So, firstly, we're joined by Dr Lux Ratnamohan. He is a Clinical Academic in Psychiatry with the Sydney Local Health District and the University of Sydney. His clinical work and research focus on child and adolescent mental health, with a particular emphasis on emotionally-based school avoidance. He leads the Network for Coordinated Health - Education Interventions (NiCHE-EBSA) a funded research program studying tiered intervention from early support to intensive care for EBSA.

And we're also lucky enough to have Dr Nikki Brunker, Senior Lecturer in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. Nikki brings extensive experience working with children, young people, teachers, parents, carers, school leaders, and educational organisations as a primary and secondary classroom teacher, and also as a principal, a researcher and a mentor for teachers and school leaders.

So, I'm going to hand over to Lux now, and he will take us through his slides. Thank you. 

Lux, you're on mute.

Lux Ratnamohan

Okay, is that, is that better?

Brett Wilson

Yeah, and just hit the display settings on your slides as well, yeah.

Lux Ratnamohan

Okay, good. Okay, let's try that again. Thanks for the introduction, Brett, thanks for the invitation to come here today, and I appreciate you all taking time out of your day to tune into this.

Just a little bit about myself. I'm a child and adolescent psychiatrist, and most of my experience in this space is from working as a clinician with young people with severe forms of emotionally-based school avoidance. More recently, I've got into research, so I think whatever I talk about today is really through the prism of the severe end of the spectrum, and I appreciate if you're working in a school setting, you're seeing a much broader spectrum. I'll just quickly run through a bit about some background.

This is stuff you're all aware of: rising school attendance problems, both nationally and internationally, and it's really been something that's happened over the last 10 years. It predates the pandemic, but it was potentiated by the pandemic. This graph here, you've probably all seen it, it's basically data on the school attendance level, so that's the proportion of young people getting to school 90% of the time, and what you can see is a gradual reduction over the last 10 years. This is a slide of students' self-reported sense of belonging. It's New South Wales data. Again, similar trend over a similar time period.

Another way of thinking about this is the number of young people opting out of face-to-face schooling and choosing homeschooling. Numbers have basically tripled again over the last decade. And all of this is in parallel to what's been dubbed a youth mental health crisis. So basically, again, over that same 10-year period, you see basically a doubling in mental health problems in young people, and particular demographic groups are more affected.

So, it's always useful to think, whenever you're thinking about anything, to think a little bit about the historical concept and what's changed. If you're to go back and read a textbook about school refusal, as it was called back then, for the most part, what you'll see is a problem that's described as fundamentally a behavioural problem. Often, the literature on school refusal tends to be quite family-blaming, and the common narrative is the idea that there's something that's not working in the family that stop, that's allowing the young person to not go to school.

And then the other part of that is this sense that children have to adapt to, to the school environment. Fast forward to now, it's, it’s I think, quite a different way that this problem's seen. I think nowadays we're more likely to see school avoidance as a downstream signal of mental health or developmental problems.

There might be family dysfunction, but that's not necessarily the cause of the problem. More often, that's, that’s part of a vicious cycle, that the more the young person's out of school, the more families struggle.

And I think there's a broad sense that, that schools have to adapt to diverse needs. It's useful to think about some of the things that, that have happened in this intervening time. On the one hand, we've had social media, we've had the pandemic.

And then on the other hand, there have probably been what might be thought of as maybe more positive influences, like a general recognition of concepts like neurodiversity or diverse abilities. By the way, because of these changes in our understanding, this is a really contested topic. And one way you can say that is it's, it’s a topic that gets assigned lots of different names. So, for a long time, school refusal was the standard nomenclature. More recently, you've got advocacy groups pushing ‘School Can't’ as the term that best describes this problem, and I suppose somewhere in the middle of that is emotionally-based school avoidance. That's, that’s my preferred term, because I think it's maybe the most neutral, but I think this is, it's a heterogeneous problem, and I think there's lots of different perspectives, and they all add something to the pie.

So, I'll, what I'll talk about now is just some basic, I suppose a primer on emotionally-based school avoidance from a mental health perspective. First thing, it's always useful to, to think about how we classify problems. This is an older way of classifying school attendance problems, but historically, it's been broken into four groups: Truancy, school refusal, school exclusion, and parent withdrawal.

And when we think about school refusal, again, you can break it down into different categories. So there's negative reinforcement. That's young people who, when they're at school, their experience of intense negative affect, or anxiety attached to being evaluated, whether socially or academically, they're the things that keep them away from school. And then on the other end, you've got positive reinforcement, so that's when there's maybe a loved one at home, or an enjoyable activity at home, and that's what's keeping them away from school. As a clinician, I rarely see one of these patterns. It's more often a combination, and they're usually interacting with one another.

Next bit is about epidemiology. This is all outdated. 20 years ago, we would have said that epidemiology or the prevalence of school refusal, as we called it then, was 2-5%. We know nowadays it's at least 10% or upwards, we just don't have good epidemiological data to, to really pinpoint the number. Typically, onset is early adolescence - times to the transition to high school. And what you see in more recent data is the number's much higher in certain subpopulations, so young people with autism spectrum disorder and young people with medical disabilities.

Another point that I think is worth reflecting on is the cost of a young person with severe school avoidance. So, we all know the massive impact of severe mental illness on a person's life and their trajectory. To my surprise, the cost, the economic cost of leaving school early and not going into any vocational or further educational training is basically equivalent to, to severe mental illness. And for many young people with emotionally-based school avoidance, that's, that’s where things end up when, when the problems become chronic.

Another way of thinking about this from a mental health perspective is, it's a transdiagnostic syndrome. Doesn't matter what your disorder is. Once the level of severity is advanced enough, a young person will have trouble going to school.

You can also think of school avoidance as a stage modifier, and what we mean by that is, you've got an illness, being in school is protective. Being out of school for an extended time will accelerate your, your mental health problems and your level of impairment.

And finally, I think it's useful, especially in complex cases, to, to just think about school avoidance as a syndrome in and of itself. So, I, I find the most useful way to think about it as in terms of vicious cycles.

The first thing that we usually see is that even before a young person stopped going to school, they've often had an experience at school where it's just been harder. It's been a higher level of strain, and they're less attached to their school.

Often it's to do with learning struggles, sometimes social struggles, and sometimes sensory overload.

Then, there's often some sort of nodal event that triggers a, a fear avoidance cycle. Most commonly, it's to do with social anxiety and social evaluation, sometimes academic anxiety. Sometimes there's specific traumatic events related to bullying or peer exclusion. Less often, there's separation anxiety. Regardless of what it is, the thing about the fear avoidance loop is that it generalises. The longer you're out of school, the more you attribute threats to anything associated with school, and eventually it becomes anything associated with, with spaces with young people. So, what might have started as avoiding one day of the week will eventually become avoiding school, and then avoiding leaving the house.

The next thing that happens is when a young person's stuck at home, it, it forces a family to reorganise. Invariably, there's going to be parental anxiety. For some, for some carers, that will be their natural instinct will be to take the protective stance of their young person, and in an attempt to protect their young person from what they perceive as, as maybe an unsafe school environment, they might allow the young person to, to have more time off school. But of course, that only reinforces the young person's avoidance.

The other end of the spectrum are, are parents who, again, out of anxiety, get really frustrated, and they want to short-circuit the problem, so they'll push their young person back to school, but maybe without, with an inadequate understanding of, of the young person's perspective or with inadequate supports in place. And for the young person, that'll be rejecting, or that'll feel rejecting, and, and maybe the young person will distance themselves from the parent.

With enough time, what you see is carer burnout. And in families where there's two parents at home, often what we'll see is what we call a hard-soft split, where maybe one parent's taking a protective stance, and another parent's trying to maybe force the issue, and that conflict then further reinforces the young person's difficulties getting out.

The bit that I think doesn't get spoken of enough is what, what we call ‘systems inertia’. School avoidance usually is at the intersection of education and health, but we don't have a clean interface. So, when a young person's out of school, often schools will do a lot, but at a certain point, if the young person's not at school, there's only so much a school can do.

But trying to get a mental health service involved is, is, it's just a tricky process. There's often unclear referral paths, mental health services are often under-resourced, and they won't necessarily see school refusal as a high acuity problem. Even when you do get a mental health service involved, there's often ambiguity about what the health service is doing, what the family's doing, and what the school's doing.

And, for a young person who has trouble going to school, they're going to have trouble going to a mental health clinic and, and engaging with strangers. So what tends to happen is intervention tends to be very delayed, and with that you get inertia, and what might have been an acute problem becomes an entrenched problem, and all of the preceding cycles have become much more ardent by that point. And then finally, if a young person's stuck at home for long enough, they will invariably start to feel really stuck. They're, they’re in a predicament, and they've got no way out. Their short-term strategy for coping is avoidance, but it's a lousy long-term strategy. And over time, the penny drops, they start to feel like they're, they’re falling behind academically, they're losing friendships, and generally, their default at that point will be to look for ways of escaping. Often that's in the online world.

The other pattern we often see is young people who will reverse their sleep cycle and basically be awake at night, asleep during the day, and I think that's just their way of not trying to be in contact with, with the reality that they're in. If you talk to them, or if they talk for long enough, they'll usually express a lot of shame that, that they're so stuck, and that they're a burden on their family, and they'll invariably express a lot of loneliness and, and hopelessness. And if that goes on for long enough, a young person will, will become clinically depressed. And as you all know, depression kills motivation, kills energy, and it makes it much harder to get up and started. So this is the pattern that we tend to see with young people who have been out of school for, for long enough.

I'll now talk a little bit about interventions. My guess is a lot of you will have heard about multi-tiered systems of support for school attendance problems. It's a relatively new idea, but it's, it’s quite a powerful framework for coordinating responses between education and health services and really using, I guess, public health thinking.

I'll just quickly run through this now. Tier 1 is, is whole-of-school population stuff, so this is preventative efforts. There's reasonable evidence for all of the things that I've listed there. I, I won't go through them because I think this is the sort of stuff that you'll all be much more well-versed in than me. I think the key bit here is that most of this research is for generic school attendance problems, rather than emotionally-based school avoidance.

The next tier is for at-risk students. So, Tier 2 is for young people who’ve got risk factors that might compromise their school attendance down the track. And again, there's some, some decent evidence for mentoring or case management, parent engagement, academic supports and structured engagement programs where you're really trying to build the young person's connection with the school as, as a protective resource. 

Next is Tier 3, and I've, I’ve put Tier 3 and Tier 3+, because I think this is a broad category. When the, the, the, I mean, MTSS comes from America. Their definition for Tier 3 is attendance less than 90%. As we've just seen, that's probably about 30-40% of secondary school students in Australia, so that's, that’s too big for a Tier 3. I tend to think of it as a group of young people with emerging school attendance problems, and then a group with more entrenched, school avoidance. The second group, they're typically not getting, they're getting to school less than half the time for, for the last school term, and it's almost always in the context of mental health problems. These young people will often benefit from mental health treatment if they can access it. There’s, it's often undersold, but there's a good evidence base for mental health interventions for, for emotionally-based school avoidance. CBT's got the most evidence, but there's also good evidence for other psychosocial interventions and parent, parent interventions as well.

The tricky bit about this is, even, even with the best interventions, about 60% of young people will make a, a satisfactory return to school, which, on the one hand, is disappointing. On the other hand, these are, are affordable interventions, and that's, that’s, that’s not a bad outcome.

I think the trickier bit is in the real world, the effectiveness rates are much lower, sort of in the 20-30% rate, and that's probably because in the real world, it's much harder to develop, to deliver these therapies, with good fidelity to the model.

And then I think, for me, the scarier bit is there's a lot of young people who won't ever get access to outpatient-based mental health interventions. So that's the Tier 3+. Tier 3, there is some emerging evidence for school-based interventions for these young people who are, who at school less and less.

My guess is there's much more happening on the ground, it just hasn't been packaged up into research yet. The, the two models that you hear most about are wraparound models, which usually, it usually involves school partnering with another agency.

And then school-based mental health services.

And then finally, the young people who are stuck, and really not getting to school at all, and have had an, an attempt at mental health treatment in an outpatient setting, and that still hasn't worked, these young people have what I call severe emotionally-based school avoidance. And they warrant intensive rehabilitation. There's limited, but promising, evidence for any sort of intensive intervention. That, in some cases, that's transitional alternative education programs, hospital day programs, inpatient programs. They all use the same formula. Basically, the young person comes into the program, usually for one to two school terms, it's a group-based program, so they get a chance to re-socialise. And it's a transitional program, so they get a chance to practice coming into the program, and the program acts like a bit of a bridge, not just into, into back into school, but really kind of out into life.

Of course, these are resource heavy, they're hard to come by, but it's important that, that we're thinking about them for young people who, who have tried everything and haven't gotten very far.

The final thing I'll talk about is what I call the treatment gap, and I think this is, in my mind, the most modifiable bit that we've got when it comes to this problem. So, what's the treatment gap? You can apply this to any medical problem. Basically, it's the proportion of individuals who require care but haven't received evidence-based treatment. And when I think about emotionally-based school attendance problems, I would say it's probably much higher than that what you might see in a lot of other mental health disorders. So, what are some of the reasons for this? 

One, it can be tricky to detect. Often it doesn't present, often it presents in a disguised form. Often it's presenting at points of transition, when you might not know the young person well enough to know what the nature of the problem is.

The next part is, if you do detect it and the young person needs mental health services, it's hard to get young people into the appropriate mental health service. And then finally, when young people do get into the appropriate mental health service, often they're not getting evidence-based treatment, or they're having trouble engaging in treatment.

There are some solutions for this. One of the big ideas, probably more out of America, is the idea of attendance teams. Some other ideas are, are screening tools and just using attendance data more effectively.

Another thing which, in my mind, is, is probably key, is having better interfaces between health and education. And then having staging criteria so everyone can just really simply classify the severity of a young person's problems and figure out the appropriate referral pathway.

Finally, it's, it’s a problem where we don't have clinical guidelines, even though we do actually have enough evidence to say that, that some things are likely to work.

And we, I think there's, there’s a need to develop more accessible Tier 3 interventions. One is school-based mental health provision. The other one's outreach mental health, where there's maybe some less barriers for, for young people accessing care. Okay, I'll, I'll wrap it up there. Thank you.

Brett Wilson

Thanks so much, Lux. Over to you now, Nikki.

Nikki Brunker

Thank you, Lux. I'll just get my slides up. Thank you, everybody for being here. Thank you for the invitation from Be You to be here today.

Let me just see… Okay. My slide showing now?

Brett Wilson

Yep.

Nikki Brunker

No? Sorry, can somebody just let me.

Josie Molloy

They are.

Nikki Brunker

Thanks, Josie. Wonderful. Okay, so, I'll jump straight in. And, I first off want to add to Brett's Acknowledgement of Country. I'm currently on Dharawal lands and work on Gadigal lands, and I think it's particularly important that we recognise the Country that we're working on today, given that we know that Aboriginal children and young people are significantly impacted by school avoidance issues.

Just to give you a quick intro to me, I have been a teacher in early childhood, primary and secondary. I've also been a principal in primary and secondary. I've taught across alternative and mainstream schooling.

I've been, I've been a teacher educator for many years now, and teach across foundations of pedagogy in undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

And I'm also a researcher, and the focus of my research is very much on re-educating school, schooling, and this will become clear why I'm introducing this as I work through what I want to share today.

In my research, there are three key arms to it. I look at the experience of school, I look at alternative practices of education, and I also look at critical pedagogy. And the last thing I want to mention is that I'm a parent, and I mention that because I have experienced issues related to school avoidance as a teacher, as a principal, as a mentor in schools, and I've experienced it as a parent.

So, I'm coming to you today with a pedagogic perspective, and I don't mean pedagogic in the sense that it is used in contemporary policy, which simply means pedagogy is teaching. I'm talking about the much broader perspective of pedagogy, which embraces the performance of teaching with the discourse, the relationship between teaching and learning. And that means the visible and the invisible work of, of teaching.

Like Lux, I want to think about the terminology that we use. We've commonly used school refusal, we're seeing it framed more as school avoidance and ‘School Can't’. I'd like to challenge that, and I'd like to draw on some of the work that's happened over the last, 10-20 years in challenging our understanding of behaviour and student behaviour.

And if we think about the way that we placed onus on students for their misbehaviour in school, we absolve schools and teachers of responsibility for their own pedagogical choices.

I'd like to think about school avoidance in a similar way. Rather than placing the onus on students, what happens when we shift and we look at the responsibility of teachers, schools and systems?

So if you haven't read this book already, Carla Shalaby's book, Troublemakers, is an absolutely brilliant, wonderful book to gain insight into the experience. My dog has started barking, I don't know why, so I apologise if anyone can hear that. If you can, let me know and I will do something about it. If not, I will keep going and ignore her.

Oh, I've, what I particularly love about this book is that Carla Shalaby talks about children who, and young people, who are challenging our system of education as the canaries in the mine, that they are actually warning us of the dangers of school.

And if we step back and think about kids who are refusing school, who are avoiding school, who can't go to school, if we stop and think about them as the canaries in the mine, mine what are they telling us about school?

This is a continuum of what happens for kids, for children and young people in being unable to attend school. This starts with, attend school with signs of stress and requests for non-attendance. It starts at the point of absenteeism. My research, my work with schools, children and young people and families is looking well before that.

I want to understand what's going on at school that actually leads to this situation. So, Lux is very much talking about when we're much further into this, where absenteeism has become entrenched, that we're now seeing this as a mental health issue. What's happening well before for kids to be so unsettled by the space that they're in on a daily basis in an environment that they have no free will to be there or not, that they end up seeking that power to say, “I'm not going to be there.”

So, in shifting onus, I want to think about, what if we turned it from school refusal, ‘School Can't’, school avoidance, to recognise that school actually hurts many students? It stresses students, it traumatises some students, and it alienates far too many students.

“Morally, the only reliable people, when the chips are down, are those who say, ‘I can't’.” This is a quote that some colleagues of mine used recently in talking about the issue of school refusal, and their concern that we need to shift perspective. This is a quote from Hannah Arendt, talking about Nazi Germany.

When we stop and use it in this context, and we think about why are children and young people saying, “I can't,” what are they telling us about the environment that they can't be part of? It shifts our perspective, and maybe we then need to start asking, ‘Why is it that children and young people do want us to go to school?’

Let me put it in another way. In the time period that we have seen school avoidance escalate, we have seen standardisation escalate dramatically.

Concurrent to that, we have seen teacher professionalism decline dramatically. We have seen consistent messaging from teachers that they do not have the time or support to relate to children and young people, and to respond to their needs.

And, we have seen an increasing escalation in teacher attrition. Teacher attrition. What if we called it ‘teacher refusal’? What would that tell us about schooling?

What I want to think about is before avoidance, before absenteeism, starts, are we developing belonging? Are we developing engagement within schooling practice? When we stop and think about engagement, there's a key theory called Self-Determination Theory that recognises basic psychological needs of relatedness, competence and autonomy. How much are our schooling systems enabling schools and teachers to build the skills of relatedness, competence and autonomy?

This is a mind map drawn by a 14-year-old in some research I did looking at the role that school plays in the ability and the development of the ability to live well in a world worth living in for all. In this child, in this young person's mind map, they clearly demonstrated that there is no space whatsoever in their school experience for relatedness, competence or autonomy; that that's what they do outside of school. 

Yet, schooling negatively impacts on those opportunities outside of school, because when they get home, they've got to focus on the homework, etc, etc, which reduces their opportunity for connecting with friends and family, building those skills for relatedness. It impacts the opportunities to engage in their interests and their skill development, building their competence and their autonomy to determine what their interests are, what skills they need to be developing to develop those interests that are going to lead to other paths in their life.

If we also flip and think about where are kids who have said, “I can't go to school,” where do they start experiencing success? As Lux has recognised, our greatest area of growth in education at the moment is home education and flexi schools. Now, when we start looking at what's happening in flexi school environments, what are they, what are kids telling us is supporting them to be at school, complete school successfully? They're telling us that there is flexibility.

They're telling us that their teachers have the time to build relationship with them, and opportunities for them to build relationships with their peers and their broader community.

They're telling us that within that flexibility and those relationships, teachers are able to manipulate curriculum with them, for them to engage in their interests, and for them to take an individualised path in their learning to build their competence, and to enable the development of autonomy, so that they have ownership in the self-direction of their learning.

So, where do we go with this? What I really want to emphasise is that this is a systemic issue. We need system-wide change. What schools are able to do is constrained enormously by the pressures that schools are placing on them, through escalating standardisation, through the demand for evidence-based practice that is based on a very, very, very small, very select range of research evidence that is mandating teaching practices that require all children to be the same. If we look at the groups of children and young people experiencing school avoidance, school refusal, ‘School can't’, we are looking at kids with neurodivergence, LGQBTI students, Aboriginal students, and increasingly, from my own research and colleagues' research, we're recognising profoundly gifted kids. This tells us we are not developing a system where schools are enabled and supported to develop the diversity of needs of our children and young people. That we are forced into a mechanism that requires all students to be the same. So teachers are then in this very, very difficult position of being pressured to conform to these policy requirements that are not supporting kids. 

What can we do? I think it's really, really hard for teachers at the moment. I think there's very limited options of what we can offer teachers at this present time. My number one suggestion to teachers is: be a kid for a day. Go and experience your own school. See what it feels like to be a child or a young person in your own school. That's our point that, at which we can then start playing with what I call the ‘wriggle room’ in our school, in our pressures that are coming down from the system demands to find those opportunities for where we can be, building relatedness, competence and autonomy. Thank you.

Brett Wilson

Amazing, thank you, Nikki. And thank you, Lux. Just… I'm trying to get Lux back on… Here he is. Thank you very much to you both, such a well-rounded approach to, I guess, the challenges that our audience are facing, and, and coming at it from both the angle of the clinical lens and the high-level interventions that you did, Lux, but also the, I really like the belonging and engagement conversation that you started there, Nikki. 

And we did, we did develop, we did, request some pre-questions that people might have from the audience as part of the registration, and I'll read a couple out to you, but if, I'll ask them directly to, one of you, but if either of you want to add anything, feel free to do so. And then we've got a couple of people from schools in the audience that have got some questions that will highlight them, and they'll ask you as well, so. 

Nikki, what measures are needed at an organisational level to have a, an effective whole-school approach to school avoidance? And, just, in that, I think the, belonging and engagement conversation that you started there is, is probably where we want to start that, convo again.

Nikki Brunker

Okay, so we need education leaders to be willing to support their teachers to do what they know they need to do as professionals, to be professionals, to be pedagogic, which means that they are actually going to prioritise their students and respond to the diversity that they're working with, rather than conform to what they're being pressured to do under mandates of constant direct instruction, constant demands of external standardised assessment, etc. That we need to be able to step back and support education leaders to have the ability to speak up. At the moment, we know that education leaders are being silenced from, from engaging in these conversations, to push back on these damaging impacts of what we claim to be evidence-based practice, and I will emphasise that the evidence that is being used is often non-existent, or a tiny portion of this amount of education research. And I think that places teachers in a really difficult position, because they're not always in a place where they can engage with this immense amount of research. It's the education leaders who need to be taking that role, and supporting their teachers to be the one in the classroom, recognising what is before them, and trusting their teachers to say, “This is not acceptable for the kids in my classroom. This might work for this child at this particular time, but it doesn't work for this child, and it doesn't work in these particular ways.” Offering those opportunities for flexibility to say, “No, this child doesn't need to do this, but this child has a different expectation.” Being able to have that degree of flexibility, teachers need school leader support to do that.

Brett Wilson

Great, thank you. Lux, is there anything that you would like to add to that one, or…

Lux Ratnamohan

No, no, I think Nikki, Nikki covered that well.

Brett Wilson

Yeah, the one I'll ask you is, how can schools provide effective support for neurodivergent students who may be at risk of experiencing school avoidance?

Lux Ratnamohan

Yeah, so this is, I think, a really topical question. I think probably just thinking about what the research tells us, the first thing is, for a long time, young people with autism were excluded from research studies looking at school refusal. So there's a big gap in what we know works for young people with autism. The second thing is, more recently, what we, what's really clear is young people who are neurodivergent have, are much more likely to have difficulties with school and with school attendance.

I think, having said that, in my own experience, I think a lot of the same things that work for any young person work for young people on the, the spectrum, and a lot of the things that don't work for lots of young people don't work for young people on the spectrum.

Bits that I'd always be thinking about is, less so the diagnosis, ASD, but more what are the features of the young person's, difference, what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, and how does that, how does that make school difficult? And how might that also make evidence-based treatments difficult? So I think for some young people on the spectrum, talking therapies just don't work, and there's something about it that's uncomfortable. Things that do work might tend to be things that are more movement-based, or more, more doing-based. That'd be one example. 

I think another thing is that for young people on the spectrum, often change takes a bit longer. And they might need a little bit longer to, to warm up and get into a routine. One of the things we find with our programs, in general, young people on the spectrum at first struggle much more in our programs. But we also find that once they're on the right track, they tend to be, quite, quite driven to just continue. Sometimes maybe being a bit rule-bound and a bit routine-based means that when they get into a good routine, they tend to be able to hold it a bit better.

Brett Wilson

Yeah, great. Thank you. Yeah, I really, really love that part around strength and weaknesses, and emphasising that as, as the means to support all young people in, in this circumstance.

Next, we've got a couple of our participants, or attendees, that are going to Zoom in with a question, and, and feel free for either of you to just, answer, or you can combine your responses to them. So I'll hand over to Bradley Headlam to introduce himself and the school he's from, and ask the question that he would like to.

Bradley Headlam

Yeah, thank you. Can you hear me okay?

Brett Wilson

Yeah.

Bradley Headlam

Right. It's a little bit long-winded, so bear with me. My question's around building the capacity of secondary school parents. For our students who are experiencing school avoidance, we follow internal wellbeing procedures and engage external services to provide support, but these generally haven't resulted in positive shifts in behaviour. Often in conversations with parents, it would seem as though there is a breakdown in the construction of boundaries in the home that has occurred some years ago, and as a result, we have a young person who is glued to their device, struggles to organise themselves for school, and presents with high anxiety. If, by some luck, the child does come to school for a meeting, we provide every opportunity of support, re-engagement, etc, modified timetables, wellbeing, all those different things, and they do not meet their commitment the next day. 

My question is, how do we build up parent capacity in the home, and what is available to support them to deliver on getting their child to school?

Brett Wilson

There's a lot in that one. Lux, Nikki?

Nikki Brunker

I think the first thing to think about is how phenomenally hard it is for everybody. I think that's, that's the first thing. And how, how significantly this impacts on parent-child relationship. And if we can preserve or rebuild parent-child relationship, for me, would be the first priority, because without that, nothing is going to shift there. 

The other thing for me is to recognise that they are pushing back on an environment that is still there. They're still required to go back to the same environment that they've pushed back on. And I'm not talking about, you know, changing schools as being the remedy. I'm simply recognising just how phenomenally difficult that is. And sometimes it requires a, something to break that, you know, that it needs to be an alternative option as an interim, and not necessarily an alternative school, but I know that there are a number of programs happening in schools around Australia that are working within a school, but externally offering programs as a bridge and as a circuit breaker to address some of the, the damage, some of the issues that have been developed within the environment, and, and I also recognise that many of the issues that secondary schools are facing have been built from primary school, so it's not necessarily even their own environment, but children and young people are still associating that with this school environment. So, connecting with a circuit breaker program that enables them something between home and school is often a useful situation.

Lux Ratnamohan

Yeah, yeah, so I agree with what you said, Nikki. Brad, that's such a common scenario, isn't it? I think anytime people bring up questions in these forums, it's, it’s a really hard case where probably not much is going to work, but it's a good template.

The, the bits I'd be saying, what we know from research is, yes, parental mental health problems, parental lack of self-efficacy is, are risk factors for school attendance problems. The bit that's really interesting is, in some parts of mental health, there's really good evidence for better parenting makes the difference. One of the biggest examples of that is anorexia nervosa where family-based treatment, great evidence for it. Interestingly, school avoidance, the evidence just isn't great for parents changing what they're doing being the thing that makes a difference. And what that tells me is parents are probably trying their best, and they're probably in too deep, that the problem's too entrenched.

So, in my mind, it's, there's two parts to it. There does need to be parenting, a parenting intervention. Usually, some of the low-hanging fruit, if there's one parent who's doing all the heavy lifting, bringing the other parent in and getting that to change the dynamic. Often you need an external service doing that, but you've probably already got that. 

The other bits are, are getting everyone to commit to concrete goals, but it sounds like you've done that. Seeing how far you get. But then, if you've tried everything, I think what Nikki's saying makes a lot of sense. Sometimes there's just too much water under the bridge, and you just need a, a bridge place, something that's different, that's going to be a circuit breaker, so everyone - Mum, Dad and kid - get enough relief to, to be able to change things up. And Brad, you're probably thinking, we haven't got any of those options here. So, yeah, difficult case.

Brett Wilson

Yeah, thanks very much for that, Brad, for that question. I think it, it encapsulates a lot of what we've talked about. Nikki, did you want to jump in? Sorry. Yep.

Nikki Brunker

Just add one more bit to that. Even thinking about those possible bridges, sometimes thinking laterally for those opportunities. One of the things that I've explored before is opportunities for service learning. Opportunities where kids actually engage in an activity where people value them, thank them, you know, that's massive. And depending on the age of the kid, giving them an opportunity to be in a workplace where other people are valuing their contribution can also be an enormously beneficial circuit breaker and a reminder for them of, ‘Oh, that's what school's for. That's what can enable me to do this, that, or the other.’

Brett Wilson

Beautiful, thank you. I'm just mindful of time, and we have Sheralee Fordham still, to ask her question, so I'll hand over to you, Sheralee.

Sheralee Fordham

Hi everyone, I'm a Learning and Support Teacher with the New South Wales Department of Education in a rural, regional, remote area, or rural, regional.

We have a lot of school avoidance at our school, and funnily enough, the students are actually still at school, they just don't go to classes. So, that's one of our biggest challenges at the moment. We're in a fairly unique situation because we're still on a temporary school site as well, so that creates a whole other layer of, of different things to manage. My question is, what is the most effective way to shift teacher practice when it comes to school avoidance? How can we then help support teachers to support the kids in a better way?

Nikki Brunker

As I said, I think the first thing is get them to be a kid for a day. Get them to experience it, and it's often, it's often the thing that can really shift a teacher to recognise, ‘Oh, I was a bit boring,’ or ‘Actually that was really fast-paced, and I had to move from this to this and this, and I didn't really keep up,’ or whatever it might be that, you know. It's amazing that the takeaways teachers come back with.

But also, I think that one of the hardest things is that for all of us in education, we've been very successful in education. We've come through the, the mainstream education, that's what we know, that's what's been successful for us, and it's very hard to look out and, and understand the scope, because it's very, we don't often see what these things look like.

And, you know, I know somebody has put in the, in the Q&A, you know, the class size of flexis, yeah, less than 10, 10 per class. Yep, that, that's, that's true. So maybe that's something we need to look at as a system, that that's, that's what works, so how about we move towards that? But let's look at, what are the, the options around the world. So there's one particular thing that comes to mind for me that I would be doing as a school leader in that environment, which is take the classes to where they are, and change the whole approach to the classes. So there's a system of education that embeds professionals and tradespeople within school environments, so that they are, they're like the artist in residence. It might be the carpenter in residence, the chef in residence, or whoever it might be, and they are actually actively going about their work in situ in the school. No formal lesson, etc, but eventually kids start going, ‘What are you doing?’, and you've got them. And you start drawing them in, and you can start building from there.

Valuing that it's a slow process, I think that's really important for teachers and students, for everybody to recognise this is a slow process, and like all human development, it's organic, it's messy, it moves back and forth, is, is incredibly important as well.

Brett Wilson

Anything from you there, Lux? Thank you very much, Nikki, that was… yep. 

And to Bradley and Sheralee, thank you very much for helping us make this panel part, this Q&A part a little bit more interactive. We really appreciate it. We're drawing to an end now of our time together this afternoon, and I just want to shout out to both of you again. This has, we've covered so much ground in an hour, it was, I think we could honestly talk for another couple, the way that the conversations are going, and, and the amount of questions that we've had. I think, in summary, it's highlighted just how complex this space is for educators, but also the people that are supporting the educators with that, and we've talked about parents and clinicians and the support networks around young people. And the system as well, and, yeah, we were never going to, necessarily solve the situation, but I think we've really highlighted some things, and there's some comments in the chat around things that have resonated with people and, and validated what they're already attempting to do, so... Yeah, I’ll hand over to either of you for any closing remarks. I've got a couple of slides that I'll finish on, but, yeah, just want to give you that opportunity.

Lux Ratnamohan

Nothing to add from me, but thank you, thank you for the invitation.

Nikki Brunker

Thank you, and thank you to everybody who's here, who's so interested in exploring this topic.

Brett Wilson

Absolutely. Speaking of exploring the topic, as I mentioned earlier, we're running a follow-up workshop for school leaders and, coordinators, wellbeing staff, etc, that people could come along to, share some practice that they're having success with, or they're struggling with. You'll get a chance to meet with your state-based teams.

So, those workshops can be registered through that QR code, and we'll unpack a little bit of the supports in your region that can help you through either departments or sector supports, and also share with your colleagues as well.

Second to that, we also have a workshop that is very similar to this one, in terms of a panel, and that will be running next term, and that's going to be centered around the impacts of the social media delay on young people.

And there's also a follow-up workshop for that as well, so you can scan and register there as well. The workshops and next term’s events will also be in the chat from Sophie.

Thank you very much again. I reiterate what Nikki said. Thank you so much for giving up your time and, and focusing in on this. As we've all mentioned, it's a complex situation that you deal with in your role as educators, and we really appreciate all the hard work that you put in to try and engage those young people back in school.

Thank you, everyone. Have a good night.