Senate report calls for urgent action on school refusal
A parliamentary inquiry into rising rates of school refusal is recommending there be a national action plan to combat the phenomenon, as well as support to help break the shame and stigma felt by thousands of families.
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00:00 The committee found that there needs to be a proper definition which is going to be defined
00:07 now by research and that will go to all state education departments and then they will be
00:12 able to track and break it down state by state and give us some actual data on how many people
00:17 this is affecting. In the context of the 4 million students in the Australian school
00:21 system it's probably going to be low but we know it has a devastating impact for the families
00:27 that it does influence and for now they're just all lumped in with more casual truants
00:32 whose parents often don't know that they're missing school whereas this is something really
00:36 different. I spoke to one mother whose child had missed almost an entire year of school
00:41 and the committee heard from many parents and families like that who spoke about the
00:46 impact and it's really devastating for everyone for their physical, mental and financial wellbeing.
00:52 Being able to pinpoint what's happening with children is clearly critical in order to give
00:57 them the support that they need. So with what we do know about this issue, as you say it's
01:02 emerging I imagine the pandemic has had an incredible impact as well on a lot of families.
01:08 Who is most likely to be affected by this type of an experience and what are some of
01:14 the situations that they're facing and dealing with that? Yeah so the committee found and
01:18 this is backed up by peer support groups that I've spoken to that have been dealing with
01:22 this for a long time that it's often neurodivergent kids, children that might have a diagnosis
01:27 of autism or ADHD or another kind of learning disability and when they're little kids those
01:33 differences are accepted by everyone but as they get older and go through the school system
01:37 that can make them a target for bullies and it's often the case that parents feel the
01:42 school system doesn't accept different types of neurodivergent learners who might need
01:47 extra things that are really quite small like written instructions or ear defenders for
01:52 people that have extreme noise sensitivity but often that can be really difficult to
01:57 access so these parents actually prefer to call this school can't instead of school refusal
02:02 because they say that better reflects just how overwhelming school can be for these kids
02:07 that they can actually develop almost a PTSD response every time they step onto school
02:12 so they say that it's not even really a choice for these children not to go.
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