When a Child Cannot Get to School
Updated: Oct 9
Nadia Abdi
Few issues place a family under more sustained pressure than a child who cannot get to school. In my experience, we usually meet two forms of distress at once. The young person is facing a school day that has come to feel unmanageable, and their dread is real and physical. Their parent is facing a different but equally consuming battle: the negotiation at the bedroom door, the call to the school office that has to be worded carefully yet again, the employer whose patience is being quietly spent, and the other children who still need breakfast, lunches and a lift. Neither is being difficult. Both are overwhelmed.
What makes this so corrosive is that each person’s distress amplifies the others. The child reads the parent’s tension as confirmation that something is badly wrong. The parent reads the child’s shutdown as defiance, or as evidence of their own failure. Conflict between parents about how firm to be is almost universal. Over weeks, the whole family system reorganises itself around the school morning, and everyone’s world gets smaller. For a long time, the language for this was “school refusal”, a phrase that places the problem inside the child and makes it sound like a choice. Families and clinicians increasingly use a different phrase; “school can’t”. A 2025 paper in the British Journal of Sociology of Education argued for exactly that shift, reframing the behaviour as a signal of distress rather than an act of defiance. In a consulting room, that change of word changes almost everything.
The size of the problem
The national picture supports the reframe. The National Report on Schooling in Australia shows that the proportion of students attending regularly, meaning at least ninety per cent of the time, fell from around seventy-one per cent in 2019 to just under sixty per cent in 2024. A submission to the federal Senate inquiry reported that in more than nine of every ten cases, mental health concerns such as anxiety, depression or trauma form part of the picture. In February this year the ABC reported that thousands of Australian parents are now seeking support for a child who cannot get through the school gate.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found in Australia’s Health 2026 report that mental disorders among people aged 16 to 24 have risen from about 26 % in 2007 to 39% in the most recent national survey, while the rate across the wider population stayed broadly flat. Young people are not imagining that the ground has shifted, the complexities of daily social, academic and perceived expectations are creating more distress.
Why instant relief is so powerful
What makes ‘school can’t’ so stubborn is that avoidance works, at least for an hour. Anxiety usually peaks in the anticipation rather than the event. The dread builds through the night and crests somewhere near the front door. The moment the decision is made to stay home, it drops away, and the relief is immediate. The nervous system files the lesson neatly, which is that home is safe, school is not. The next morning the wave arrives a little earlier and a little higher.
Avoidance is rarely the whole story and treating it as the whole story is where families and schools come unstuck. Sometimes a young person is managing an environment that genuinely does not fit, they might have an undiagnosed learning difficulty or sensory load that is unbearable by 3rd period. It might be ADHD that has been read as laziness, autism that has been masked or judged as rudeness, or bullying that nobody has yet named out loud. The Black Dog Institute’s Future Proofing Study, which has followed more than six thousand students across more than one hundred Australian schools, found that those who felt connected to their school in Year 8 reported significantly better mental health by Year 10, and that around one in four students report low connection. A child who feels they belong somewhere will walk towards it. A child who feels invisible will not.
The adult version of the same morning
Most parents recognise this loop more than they expect to, because many adults are running a smaller version of it. The email that stays unopened for four days. The call to the specialist that keeps sliding down the list. Australian workplace research reported this year found that 46% of people who refer to their workplace as mentally unhealthy had taken time off in the past year because of stress, anxiety or low mood. Adults simply have better cover stories and permission to take time off.
What helps kids get to school is neither force nor surrender. Pushing a distressed child through the gate teaches them that nobody can hear them. Waiting for the anxiety to lift before trying teaches them that anxiety is in charge. The work sits in between: small, planned, repeated steps back towards school, chosen with the young person rather than for them, alongside an honest look at what the school day is asking of their particular brain. It also means treating parents as part of the system, not observers of it. Their steadiness, carefully supported by the school and health professionals rather than simply assumed to exist, turns out to be one of the strongest ingredients we have.
At The Mind Clinic, my colleagues and I recognise this balance. We offer individual treatment, parenting and family support as well as diagnostic assessments for specific learning and developmental disorders. Exploring the interplay of all these factors allows a better understanding of the young person’s situational and psychological factors as well as offering a unique lens to collaborate, examine and challenge family dynamics that may be contributing to the young person’s struggle to attend school.
About the author
Nadia Abdi I Clinical Psychologist
BPsych I MPsych (Clinical)
Nadia is a clinical psychologist with over 13 years’ experience supporting school-aged children, adolescents and their families. She takes a warm, collaborative approach, helping children manage anxiety, low mood, OCD, school refusal and social difficulties, while building confidence and developing practical coping skills.
Nadia tailors therapy to each child’s needs, drawing on evidence-based approaches including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), ACT and DBT. She holds a Clinical Masters from the University of Melbourne and has experience across educational settings, public mental health services and private practice.
Make the school focus strongerShorten this to one paragraph
Comments