School trauma is real and damaging

Freedom from the myth that forcing a traumatised child back into school is a solution to 'school refusal'

I recently had a post about school trauma come up on my personal Facebook feed. About how heartbreaking it is that, still, the common response to children becoming anxious about school is to require parents to drag their reluctant children to school, sometimes kicking and screaming in distress. And to require those parents to walk away while their children are crying, sometimes as they are restrained by staff members and begging them not to leave. And it brought back some very unpleasant memories.

Most parents do occassionally leave their children crying at the door of nursery or school. And then we take ourselves off to work, or back home to cry ourselves. We do it because that is what we are told to do by the educational professionals. And we are told that they know what to do to make things right for our kids. That they are fine when we've gone. Once or twice we can perhaps brush off the feeling of guilt as tough love. A necessary evil to help our children get used to a new place without the support of their parents, or to face the consequence of not completing their homework, or to sort out the spat they had with their friend in the yard yesterday. But what if it is not just once or twice? What if it is every single day?

Would the same approach be condoned at pick-up time? Would children that were crying, or kicking and screaming, and begging for the teachers to not let go of them be calmly handed over to parents day after day? No. There would be investigations by social workers and possibly the police into why the child was so terrified to go home. Steps would be taken to resolve whatever the problem was, or, in extreme cases, to remove the child from their parents to a place of safety.

Vladislav Vasilev on Unsplash

So why isn't there the same focus on investigating and solving problems and ensuring children’s wellbeing in school? Why is it acceptable, and indeed in some places legally required, to continually force obviously traumatised children back into the same damaging school environment? Why is it such an uphill battle to get any, let alone adequate, adjustments put in place so that school is no longer anxiety provoking? Why is school attendance considered more important than the mental health and wellbeing of children? For those of us who have experienced ‘school refusal' by our children over months and sometimes years, these are questions that desperately need answered, yet they never are. Instead, we are fobbed off with excuses and parenting courses.

I know all too well from experience that the main focus of the education system in these situations is on attendance. The very term, ‘school refusal’ inevitably leads to the standard response of ‘just get them in'. Yet it is plainly obvious that ‘refusal’ is entirely the wrong word. These are not children that woke up one morning and decided that they could not be bothered going to school any more. These are children with complex needs who have been struggling with inadequate support at school for some time. For whom each bad day at school has added to the load of fear and anxiety they are carrying and has made them more vulnerable and sensitive to the next. And who have finally got to breaking point and are now utterly terrified at the mere thought of school. The correct word is trauma.

We are constantly told that the solution to the problem of their brokenness is to continue forcing these children back to school. That eventually they will ‘get used to it’, give in and comply. The fact that they had been attending and were already ‘used to it’, but had, through repeated exposure, become more anxious, not less anxious, goes totally unremarked. The approach of continuing to force my son back into the same anxiety provoking environment after he finally broke did not ‘help him get over it'. It made things worse. It led to a primary school child considering suicide. Yet, I was patronised every time I explained that proper support measures needed to be in place for my son before his return to school or things would simply continue getting worse. And I was intensely disapproved of when I stated that, in the continuing absence of that support, I was done physically dragging my son to a place that filled him with so much fear and dread that the mere thought of going there resulted in uncontrollable meltdowns. I was told that I was the anxious one, not my son. That my son was 'putting it on' and that I ‘just needed to set firmer boundaries’. They told me that the problem was me, that I couldn't get my son to school because the ‘power balance’ between us was ‘wrong’. They told me that my failures were denying my son his rightful education. In other words, I was gaslit. Emotionally blackmailed. Psychologically abused. My son had been traumatised by his time at school and the powers that be in the education system tried to bully me into bullying my son back into exactly the same environment that broke him. The even sadder thing is that if I lived somewhere else in the UK I could have been heftily fined and potentially faced prosecution for taking a perfectly reasonable stand to protect the mental health of my child.

The real problem was that the powers that be insisted that my son was ‘perfectly fine’ in school. That school is where ‘all children are meant to be’. They believed that they knew best how to look after my child because they are education professionals and I am ‘just a parent’. They ignored what I told them about what he went through every day he was there because they couldn't see or experience what was wrong with the school environment for themselves. It didn't matter how many times I explained that behind his mask of indifference my son had been desperately struggling just to make it through each day in school for years. The powers that be simply refused to beleive it. Because their brains did not process the light and the noise and the social press and the sheer fullness of the classroom in the same overwhelming and painful way. They didn't feel the unbearably scratchy uniform and the stiff painful shoes. They didn't struggle with all the unspoken social rules and expectations. They didn't feel desperately lonely and confused and scared in the loud, busy school yard. They were not bullied. They didn't find it impossible to learn and retain random uninteresting information, irrelevent to the current situation. They didn't find it difficult to process information quickly and work at speed. They saw nothing wrong in being forced to do yet more schoolwork in what was supposed to be free time to recover in the sanctuary of home. They saw nothing wrong with following arbitrary rules that made no real sense and were never explained or justified. They saw nothing unsafe about unquestioningly obeying people just because they were ‘in authority’, even when those people were clearly untrustworthy. Witholding information about Covid cases in class in the middle of a global pandemic, accusing my son of lying when he spoke up about being bullied, ignoring his requests to be sent home when he felt desperately ill and just needed to lie down in a comfortable bed in a quiet, dark room. How could a broken child ever feel safe blindly obeying such people?

The powers that be refused to accept the fact that my son was struggling right up to and beyond the point where he just couldn't bring himself do it any more. And although there were a few cherished individuals, mostly in the NHS and NGO's, that did care and did listen and did try to help, ultimately their efforts failed. Because the powers that be in the education system refused to accept that the real and urgent problem was with how the school environment was impacting my son. They never had any intention of really helping - they wanted to ‘just get him in’.

Their minds are too firmly focused on attendance figures and school regimes and national curriculums and expected attainment standards. They ignore the broken child’s actual needs for consistent trusted adults, proper understanding and support of their challenges and a feeling of safety. Instead they set unrealistic targets for the child to achieve and tut at the parents over their checklists when the child predictably fails to meet them. Really helping would mean changing their precious school regimes and relaxing their standards and scrapping their targets and throwing away their checklists. It would mean dealing with a child as a human being rather than a tick on an attendance sheet. An individual with unique hopes and fears, unquenchable curiosity about how the real world works, strong opinions about right and wrong and fairness, and their very own set of skills and interests and challenges. And it would mean treating a child with the same compassion, dignity, and respect that they would be legally entitled to as an adult similarly disabled by their work environment.

And if the powers that be did all that to help one child to feel truly safe and included in school, they would surely need to do it for all the children currently struggling in the education system. And there are alot of children struggling. And they are all different with different needs. There are no square pegs or round pegs. Each child is uniquely and perfectly shaped. Some are simply better than others at squishing themselves into the standard school-shaped holes. For some, like my son, those holes seemed like they were increasingly lined with razor blades. The effort of not touching the sides all day became more and more exhausting and terrifying, and was ultimately too much to bear.

If the powers that be really wanted to 'get it right for every child', to help all children feel safe and included and happy in school, so that they can all thrive and reach their full potential, they would let their precious, ridgid, unyielding, suffocating education system crumble into dust. They would build something new where they could treat all children as the individal human beings that they are.

Instead they stubbornly cling to an outdated system that treats children like neat lines of peg robots with standardised operating systems, attempting to programme them all with the same standard attitudes and knowledge using the same standard teaching methods and tools, and expecting standardised outputs from each child. The focus is on attendance and unquestioning obedience above all else. Human frailty is stigmatised -woe betide a child that becomes ill, or suffers a bereavement for they will be shamed for their less than perfect attendance record. Any real questioning of the approved world view put forth by the teachers is discouraged. Curiosity about anything not on the approved curriculum is squeezed further by reams of homework.

And, surprise surprise, alongside parents, screens are one of the first things blamed when a child does not fit in that system. That suspicious, uncontrolled doorway to unapproved ways of learning unapproved information. The digital doorway lets children find what they are actually interested in, and to seek out what they consider useful and important. Which is pretty much guaranteed to not be the precise slice of knowledge arbitrarily approved for children by the education system. The digital world contains equal amounts of truth and fiction. Navigating it requires children to learn how to think independently, how to spot falsehoods, how to analyse multiple sources of information and decide for themselves what and who they believe. All of which I suspect is terribly inconvenient in an education system built on children taking their teacher’s word as gospel.

It doesn't seem at all suspicious that the powers that be blame 'addiction' to screens, rather than school trauma, for meltdowns and children ‘refusing’ to go to school. Or that they constantly spread fear about the impact of screens and shame parents for giving their children access to them. Much easier than actually helping all children to feel safe and supported in school and teaching them topics they are interested in. Perhaps the fact that if you remove screens and force more school on a broken child things get worse, but if you remove school and allow screens things get better is actually evidence that alot of what we have been told is bullshit.

It has now been just over a year since I removed my son from the education system. He, and I, are doing much better these days. He is much more relaxed and happy at home. He has all the time he needs to burrow deep into history and geography and science and current affairs and how society is ever-changing, literally around us. He has the freedom to use whatever tools and methods and timetable that work for him. All in an environment that fully supports his complex needs. Neither of us misses school one little bit.

Yet even this long after his struggles in crowded classrooms and busy schoolyards, my son remains anxious amongst even small groups of people. This is a barrier to us going to most places, and to him joining in with any clubs or home ed activites within the local community. A bitter legacy of school trauma in stark contrast to his previous enjoyment of football and afterschool clubs and our pre-covid Make A Wish trip to Las Vegas to meet his favourite team of YouTubers and the Avengers cosplayers in their SHIELD training facility. A legacy that I hope that he will recover from with more time, gentle encouragement, and understanding. That he would never have recovered from while being repeatedly forced back into the same school environment that broke him.

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