The number of young people who feel as though they can’t go to school is going nuclear. School anxiety doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of going to school. It means they don’t feel safe enough – yet.

Anxiety-driven school refusal, which is what we’re talking about here, is not a wilful response from a child who is ‘just trying to get out of school’. In fact, in my experience, these kids want to be at school – they don’t want to be different – but anxiety is making school feel impossible. It’s not wilful intent. It’s anxiety. It’s the brain not feeling safe enough, and organising the body to respond with fight (anger, tantrums, aggression) or flight (a seismic need to avoid).

With the right strategies, support, and a holistic, collaborative, ‘wrap-around’ response, children can find their way back to feeling safe, strong, and happy at school, but this shift won’t come if we wait for it to come from the child. When anxiety feels too big, children don’t have the resources or the capacity to find a way out. The ‘way out’ will come from the adults around them, in a collaborative way that forms a ‘wrap-around’ response. There’s a reason for this.

School anxiety can only shift when:

CHILDREN feel the safety of teachers loving them and parents leading them.

PARENTS feel the safety of teachers loving and leading their child.

TEACHERS feel the safety of parents trusting them to love and lead their child.

If one of these is missing, children won’t feel safe, parents won’t feel safe, and teachers will feel stuck.

Let me be clear: This doesn’t mean adults cause anxiety. What it means is that they’re the ones with the power to do something about it.

(Of course, if adults are doing something to compromise physical or relational safety, then they are creating an unsafe environment, and anxiety will step in to do its job, but well-intended loving adults don’t cause anxiety.)

What needs to happen to shift anxiety-driven school avoidance? 

What schools can do.

For a child to re-engage and feel safe enough to attend school, they need to trust that at least one adult at school is willing and able to love and lead them – through big feelings and big anxiety, to help their school world feel softer.

In addressing school refusal, the question that has to be answered by a child’s school is, ‘Which adult is this child connected to at school?’ If this question doesn’t have a clear answer, a child’s anxiety will step in to keep them safe by driving school avoidance.

They need to feel welcome at school and a sense of belonging. Of course they are welcome, cared for, and belong at school, and the truly great schools are actively making sure of this, but exactly what happens to let the child know they are welcome and they belong. Just because a strategy is intended to let the child know that they matter and that they are welcome at school, this doesn’t mean the child will feel this. If you’re not sure, ask the child or teen what happens to let them know they are cared for and welcome at school.

If they can’t name anything, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening, it just means the things school is doing aren’t necessarily having the intended impact. That’s okay – this might be where the shift has to come from. 

Anything that can be done on this front will make a difference. A contemporary review conducted by the Australian Education Research Organisation clearly shows the importance of a felt sense of belonging at primary or secondary school for learning, engagement, and wellbeing. There is absolutely no doubt that for schools to be great at teaching, they have to first be great at relationships. 

An anxious child can’t learn. Many academic problems, behavioural difficulties, or learning difficulties may be ‘felt safety’ difficulties in disguise. When we provide support for learning, without addressing felt safety, we risk missing the mark. The problem is knowing exactly what will work for a particular child. We all need different things to help us feel safe, but we all have our specific ‘somethings’. So ask the young person, ‘What would help you feel cared for at school?‘ 

What parents can do.

Young people also need to feel their parents loving and leading. What parents decide, the child will follow. If parents don’t believe their child is safe and loved in the school environment, there’s no way that child will feel safe and loved there.

If you are a parent or carer, there are two questions to ask yourself. The first is, ‘Do I believe my child is safe and loved at school?’

It’s okay if you aren’t there yet – parents aren’t meant to feel safe leaving their child with any adult, even at school – but if you don’t yet believe your child is safe and loved when they attend school, what needs to happen to get you there?

If you do believe they are safe and loved when they attend school, it’s important that your child knows this too. This might sound like, ‘Yes it’s hard to be at school, and yes I know you can do this. I’m going to take you to [the adult at school you trust to love and lead them]. They’re waiting for you and they want to see you. I know they are going to take such great care of you today.’

The second question is, ‘Do I believe they are capable of being at school?‘ As long as school is safe, and as long as your child feels cared for there, your child is capable of being at school. They are brave. They are strong. They can do hard things. It won’t feel like they can handle it and it won’t feel like we can handle them not handling it – but feeling capable and being capable are different. They might not feel capable, and they are capable. We can tell them how brave and strong we believe them to be, but they won’t believe this until we give them the opportunities to experience this for themselves.

I need to acknowledge something here. Walking away from a child who is screaming for you to come back is one of the most distressing experiences as a parent. I know because I’ve been there. What I also know is that distress doesn’t hurt young people as long as they don’t feel alone in that distress. This is why the relationships they have with their important adults at school, specifically at least one consistent adult, matter so much. The distress will ease quickly when we leave, provided they can feel the caring of another important adult, and the security of us believing in them, ‘I know this is tough and I know you can handle this. I love you and I can’t wait to see you this afternoon.’ 

What if they won’t even leave the car?

If your young person isn’t able to get out of the car or the house, we have to recognise that they don’t have the resources in that moment to do what we are asking. The more we ask them to do something different when their resources are low, the more alone and frustrated they are likely to feel. This will likely drive anger or even bigger withdrawal. There is another way, and my work with schools and families who are working to re-engage children with school focuses on this. When schools and families move in a strategic, ‘wrap-around’ way to support young people back to school, in a way that lets them feel the caring and the believing in them, and each other, from every angle, the results are profound.

Whenever anxiety is driving school refusal, the message we need to give is, ‘I’m not giving up on you. I’m waiting for you – and I’ll wait as long as it takes.’

But what if school refusal is because school actually doesn’t feel safe?

Feeling safe and being safe are different. Anxiety-driven school refusal does NOT mean school isn’t safe. It means it doesn’t feel safe enough – yet. Even the warmest, safest, most loving schools will be full of anxiety triggers that can make school attendance feel impossible.

This is because anxiety can happen in response to things that feel scary but which are actually safe – ‘scary-safe’ things. This can happen in any of us whenever there is anything new, hard, brave, or important we need to do.

School will be full of these triggers. It has to be because the very nature of school means it’s full of brave, growthful, new things. As safe and as certain as these might be, there will always be the risk of failure, judgement, and rejection. Even if the risk is barely there at all, the brain doesn’t care. Any risk is a risk, and even the smallest will be enough to drive anxiety and the need to avoid school. There are times to pull away and be safe, and times to move forward and be brave. Growing and living a full, happy life is about knowing the difference.

And when the school environment actually isn’t safe?

Anxiety can also be a sign that something actually isn’t safe. This is the anxiety that happens when something feels scary and is actually dangerous – ‘scary-dangerous’.

Scary-safe and scary-dangerous will often feel exactly the same. The difference is that scary-safe will be a warning, scary-dangerous will be a stop sign.

‘Scary-dangerous’ is anxiety doing exactly what it’s meant to do – keep us safe from danger. The most common factors contributing to this are unmet important sensory needs, a felt sense of social isolation, or relationships that are unsafe either because of bullying or because of outdated ‘disciplinary’ practices that give young people reason to feel unwelcome, uncared for, unseen, or unwanted. The negative effects of these outdated disciplinary practices are often completely unintentional and a result of misinformation, but intention doesn’t change the impact.

Relational safety is as important as physical safety. If a child doesn’t feel relationally safe, school won’t feel safe, and attending school will feel impossible. The problem isn’t the child or their anxiety, but a school environment that isn’t safe.

Thankfully, the damage from peer bullying is widely acknowledged, and schools work hard to protect against this. There are some beautiful practices that can be introduced in primary or secondary school that are hugely successful in reducing bullying and responding to bullying in ways that foster kindness and respect between children. 

What isn’t always as widely acknowledged is the damage that comes from outdated discipline practices and the way these contribute to impoverished relational safety at a school. Any environment that uses shame, separation, or force to manage behaviour will never feel safe for a child. Nor should it.

Our responsibility as adults isn’t to ‘manage behaviour’ but to manage the environment in which feelings and behaviour exist. We do this by managing felt safety first.

We also have to recognise that we, the adults, are the environment in which children exist. If we shame, humiliate, and compromise relational safety in any way, we’ve created an unsafe environment, and anxiety will step in to do its job. We’ll see big behaviour, children exiting school early, school absences, and school attendance problems in general.

What if the child’s behaviour is unsafe?

When a child is out of control, they are out of their control. Absolutely we need boundaries and the safety of all children and adults at school is a non-negotiable. We also have to recognise that a child in big behaviour is a child who is unable to act differently in that moment – not a child who is unwilling.

The job then falls to the adults to restore the situation, including for the child who is in emotional distress. Rather than focusing on what the child needs to do (because they have such limited capacity to do anything when they’re in an emotional storm), the focus has to shift to, ‘What can the adult do in this moment to bring safety to everyone – including the child with big behaviour.’

The schools I work with understand this, and they are working hard to implement the practices that support felt safety in all children. Sadly though, there are also many schools using wildly outdated and misinformed practices. 

When we shift from ‘behaviour management’ to ‘felt safety’ management, schools will start to feel safe for all children and adults, as they deserve it to be.

And finally …

We need to find ways to adapt the environment at school to our children, not the other way around. When an important need isn’t being met, we have two options: We either change the need, or we change the environment. We can’t change the need for felt safety – it’s instinctive – but we can change the environment by adding cues of safety. The biggest cue of safety is relationship. 

This felt safety also has to wrap around the adults. As the village outside of school shrinks, the importance of the school village magnifies. There has never been more evidence of the profound importance of relationships at school for learning, social and emotional development, and the general wellbeing and mental health of young people, yet, at the same time, the demands on our teachers are exploding.

A contemporary review of research around the world has found that the pressure on teachers to catch up with the curriculum is creating one of the environmental risk factors that are contributing to school attendance difficulties. Why? Because it is taking the opportunity away from teachers to build the relationships that support felt safety and school engagement. This is happening in all formal education settings – both government schools and independent schools.

Teachers need to feel the safety of parents trusting them, and parents and carers need to feel the safety of school being willing and able to love and lead their children. The parent-school relationship is everything. It is the net that catches our young people when anxiety makes it feel like they are free-falling, and they need strong loving hands holding on at both ends.

* The use of the word ‘school refusal’ recognises that the refusal is an anxiety-driven response from a young person who feels as though they can’t go to school, NOT deliberate or intentional behaviour.

** If you are a school and would like more information on anxiety-driven school refusal professional development workshops, parent workshops, or consults with families, please get in touch at for more information, or download this information flier.