School Refusal or School Can't?

I don't particularly like the term “school refusal”.

Refusal makes it sound like a choice.

For some children and teenagers, that isn't what is happening at all.

They may want to go to school.

They may want to learn.

They may be worried about missing lessons, falling behind or losing their friends.

And they still can't get through the door.

Look at what is happening underneath attendance not at 'School Refusal'

There are lots of reasons why a child might struggle to access school.

Anxiety. SEND. Sensory needs. Bullying. Unmet needs. Previous experiences. Relationships. The environment itself.

Usually it isn't as simple as one thing.

But once attendance drops, attendance can very quickly become the thing everybody focuses on.

How do we get them back into school?

How many sessions have they missed?

What is their attendance percentage?

Those things might need discussing, but they don't answer the most important question:

Why can't this child access school?

Until we understand that, simply increasing the pressure to attend doesn't necessarily deal with what is underneath it.

Not attending school doesn't mean not wanting an education

This is something I think gets lost.

A child can be unable to attend school and still want to learn.

They might be able to spend an hour researching something they are interested in but be unable to sit through a lesson.

They might talk constantly while walking outside but barely speak when somebody sits them down and starts asking questions.

They might struggle to complete a worksheet but spend an hour measuring, problem-solving, building or working something out because it has a purpose.

That tells us something.

We need to pay attention to it.

Alternative Provision should actually be alternative

For some children, a smaller classroom is exactly what they need.

For others, it isn't.

At The Wild Mane Project, we work outside.

Our participants might work with the ponies, use the woodland, complete wilderness activities, learn through practical tasks or simply have the space to move while we work with them.

Our 1:1 provision is built around the individual participant.

We aren't expecting every child to arrive and complete the same six activities in the same order because they happen to have been booked onto the same programme.

What we do needs to have a purpose, but how we reach that purpose can look very different from one participant to another.

It doesn't have to mean giving up on school

Alternative Provision can sit alongside school.

For some children it may be used while they are unable to attend. For others it may form part of a wider package of provision.

And for some, it can give us somewhere to start.

Because before we decide that a child needs to “get back to school”, we need to understand what happened that meant they couldn't access it in the first place.

The aim isn't simply attendance. The aim is making education accessible again.