My son refuses to go to school – and I can’t make him. But don’t blame me

What do you do when your child refuses to go to school? If they’re primary school age, perhaps you resort to the kind of methods I once found myself working with – a combination of bribery (go to school and you can have a star on your chart / an extra hour on screens / literally anything you want, what will it be?), “clear consequences” (if you don’t go to school then we won’t go to the park afterwards / if you don’t go to school then there’s no TV never ever again) and then, eventually, literally picking them up and putting them in the car, hoping they’ll give in by the time you arrive at the school gates.

But what happens when your child is in secondary school – taller and twice as strong as you? What happens when they get to a point where it wouldn’t matter what you gave them, or what you took away, because they physically cannot meet the task of getting out of bed and going into school?

Most schools today talk a lot about mental health and the importance of supporting students as individuals. School brochures and open evenings sing their own praises about how progressive and aware and inclusive the school is. You know the spiel. It’s the kind that usually involves a host of well-worn catchphrases that could be cross-stitched onto a set of lovely pillows: “Dream, Believe, Achieve”, that kind of thing.

In December 2022, I was at one of these talks for my son’s sixth form open evening, holding one of these brochures. I listened to how the school would support and shape each individual student in its care for the better. It presented the school as almost relentless in its pursuit of both happiness and contentment, and its endeavours to ignite the drive to succeed – whatever success might look like for each individual child.

At this point, my son was in year 11. He was approaching his GCSEs and looking tentatively forward to sixth form. But he was also struggling – and I was already beginning to feel as though there was a gaping chasm between what the school taglines promised and what the endless rounds of unanswered phone calls and snail pace emails actually delivered.

By the start of year 12, it became painfully clear that my son wasn’t the target neurotypical student that these kinds of promises are aimed at. After receiving a late autism diagnosis just before his GCSEs – a diagnosis which marked the end of a long and arduous process I initiated after some ongoing concerns – he made it through his exams, continuing the pattern of masking his autism with no time to implement any appropriate support at school. He then experienced a significant autistic burnout at the start of year 12.

I was devastated for him. I thought the start of sixth form would be a positive step forward – a chance to study only the subjects he loves most, with more freedoms, more free periods and no more dreaded P.E lessons. Instead, he quickly became unable to leave the house, or on many days, his bed. For my son, success began to look like simply surviving the day.

Initially, I believed that things would be okay. I still had the uplifting words of the school ethos ringing somewhere in my head. We would surely begin to see evidence of the impressive and tailored packages of support the school has to offer? Instead, despite attending meetings and asking directly for help, a few days before the sixth-form open evening rolled around again in December 2023, I received a letter informing me that his place in sixth-from was being formally withdrawn. Within the space of seven weeks – during which I felt we received virtually no support or suggestions for how to move forward – my son was kicked out of school.

How could this happen? What about all that dreaming, believing and achieving? All that beaming pride at being a school that listens, that cares, that endeavours to support every student – no matter what? Where was all the vital attention to my son’s mental health?

What I’ve now come to believe is that while it’s become fashionable for mainstream educational institutions to talk the big talk about mental health, few are set up to adequately deal with serious conditions.

My son was no longer a poster child for someone on the university path who needed a bit of support to keep him on track – a 16-year-old, with perhaps a touch of anxiety, that could be assuaged with a good chat, a pat on the back and an inspirational rhyme. Instead, he was in the throes of a very real developmental condition that was exacerbating his mental health.

He needed actual help, not a motto. While I was doing everything I could to try and access help for him, the infrastructure simply wasn’t there. With cuts to mental health services across the country, the waitlist for access to mental health services – even for a young person living with autism – is more than six months long. And a devastating postcode lottery means that some vulnerable children can be left waiting almost three years to access mental health care and support, while others can be seen within a week.

For my son, it will likely be the summer holidays before he even nears the top of the pile. Feeling desperate and out of options, I eventually obtained a private counsellor for him, but she was unable to do the work necessary to get him back into school quick enough to avoid the heavy letter hitting the door mat.

My son is not alone. In fact, shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson is due to give a key speech today outlining the growing issues, with one in five children being persistently absent from school – a statistic which has doubled since before the pandemic. There are nods towards Labour being “a party that puts children first” and “a government that makes education its priority” and even “a country where education is about excellence for everyone”; statements which sound worryingly like the tag lines of a school brochure and make me want to get the embroidery threads out.

But what happens to those kids, like my son, who are experiencing anxiety-based school avoidance? I suspect many of the families of those one in five kids are also finding that a well rehearsed routine of lip service to mental health concerns has not been enough to help their young people through the actual weight of mental illness.

When I started secondary school in 1996, mental health wasn’t a “thing”. Or, rather, the phrase was never uttered. Any mental illnesses we students suffered from (and there were many) would have to be faced quietly and alone. Almost 30 years later and I’m not sure my son would consider his experience to be all that much different – except for the fact that the phrase “mental health” is thrown around like confetti.

The support on offer is often tertiary, diluted and inadequate. It’s the kind of thing a young person might benefit from if they were feeling a bit tired, or a bit stressed about homework or exams. But this is not what it means to offer young people comprehensive support for their mental health. An adequate awareness of mental health must also mean an adequate awareness of mental illness – and what those illnesses really mean for young people and their families. This awareness appears to be lacking in almost every way across our education system and it is usually neurodivergent, socio-economically challenged children who bear the brunt of that lack most significantly.

With no other choices open to me, I have made the decision to home educate my son this year, and to see if he can meet the challenges of year 12 again next September. But I’m no longer convinced by any of the shiny statements being offered by the school’s advertising team, or comforted by their impossible promises. My son is now a whole foot taller than me, and I’ve learned that no amount of bribery, consequences or mottos can treat mental health problems, so, when next September rolls round we will start the school year the same way we abruptly and prematurely finished this one – feeling vulnerable and truly supported only by each other.