I am sure like many of you, I watched the Four Corners episode “The Kids Who Can’t” ( https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2403H011S00 ) last week on the ABC. It was a tough watch to see families struggling to function in the face of what was clearly a difficult situation with their kids. Each parent in this episode was doing their absolute best, as was each child. There were some sobering statistics indicating that school attendance has been declining over the past decade with just under half of Years 7-10 students being absent for more than 20 days per year, with Dr Glenn Melvin of Deakin University saying “rates have skyrocketed since the pandemic”. He also describes school refusal as “a child waving a big flag that saying… I am not coping” and that this problem occurs across the spectrum of public, private and catholic schools. As professionals working with families in this situation, we too have found this to be an increasingly big issue at the moment. So much so that we provided a free webinar to close to 100 school counsellors across NSW last year to bring the conversation around best practice to the fore. We also published a helpful article to help parents with what they can do to tackle this problem in their family. Go to our Latest News and Articles page on our website to access the backlog of these sorts of informative pieces or follow us on Facebook so you can be updated when these pieces are published.
Link to the original article on School Avoidance: