When Charlie Plaiter was nine, he stopped going to school. He had been diagnosed with autism the year before. A bright, capable and happy boy when he started in reception, Charlie had come to find his school a hostile and distressing place, and his teachers unsympathetic. It had reached the point where Charlie simply refused to leave the house in the morning.
“One teacher in particular showed no sense of understanding Charlie’s problems and would actually be sarcastic with him,” recalls his mother Michelle. “When I tried to explain what his problems were, the teacher wouldn’t have it. They just said he was naughty.”
There was nothing Michelle could do to persuade, cajole or bribe the boy out the door — and nine years old is far beyond the point of physical coercion. Besides, which parent would force their child to a place where they were screaming they didn’t feel safe?
Such tearful, exasperated negotiations are now part of the morning routine in hundreds of thousands of British homes. More than one in five children is now persistently absent from school, according to the Department for Education. ln 2022-23, one in 50 pupils missed over half of the school year — the figure has grown by 150% since the Covid pandemic. This is a national crisis playing out in our overcrowded, over-regimented, under-resourced schools that no amount of blaming and shaming seems able to abate.
For this is not — as Charlie’s teacher told his mother — a case of children being “naughty”. The vast majority of the absent children (92% according to one study) have special educational needs or disabilities (SEND). For vast numbers of neurodivergent and autistic children in particular, school has become a hostile environment — a place they feel unable simply to be, let alone learn, let alone thrive. Research by the National Autistic Society has found that only one in four autistic students feels happy at school. Many SEND pupils share stories of being traumatised. “By the age of 16, I was self-harming just to get through the day,” is how the trustee of one autism charity put it. Charlie would go on to threaten suicide — describing in detail to his mother how he intended to go about it.
The academic term for this is “school distress”. A recent Newcastle University study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, describes it as a symptom of a “systemic failure” of the education system to meet the needs of young people — in effect, a denial of their legal right to education. As the study makes clear, the effects on the entire family are catastrophic, with parents often sliding into debt as they are forced to give up careers to look after their distressed children. Meanwhile, they are threatened, shamed, disbelieved and gaslit by the authorities. “I had suspected the results might be bleak, but just how bleak was really shocking,’” says Dr Sinéad Mullalley, a lecturer in neuropsychology at Newcastle University, who led the recent study into the crisis. Asked to measure the mental health effects of school refusal in comparison with 17 other traumatic life events, such as serious personal injury or sexual assault, the parents ranked it as the second-most traumatic. Only the death of a child or spouse was worse.
It is compounded by a total lack of understanding from the authorities. As Charlie’s absenteeism worsened, Michelle was called into school for a meeting with his class teacher, an educational psychologist, a specialist autism teacher, the school’s deputy head, class teacher, a speech and language therapist and a paediatrician. It was the paediatrician who told Michelle that the fact that Charlie couldn’t cope in class was essentially her fault. “She said: ‘I find lots of parents just want a label for their children to cover the fact that they’re not good at parenting.’”
Michelle was, by this point, used to criticism. “When you have a child with autism and you have difficulties getting them to go to school — for all sorts of valid reasons — you are often disbelieved, blamed, shamed and made to feel guilty,” she tells me. But to have the careless comment come from a paediatrician was actually painful.
The broader picture is that Britain’s school children are not OK. Since 2010, mental health conditions have mushroomed among Britain’s young people to the point that it is no exaggeration to talk of a crisis. According to the Department for Education, more than 1.6 million pupils in England now have special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), an increase of 101,000 since 2023.
“Britain’s school children are not OK.”
To some extent, these increases are explained by an increased willingness to share experiences as well as efforts to destigmatise mental health. But this has led to new problems: online questionnaires that diagnose just about everyone with a smartphone with ADHD; common adolescent issues pathologised as conditions needing labels and treatment; and an ever-greater number of parents and children competing over ever-diminishing resources.
It has also produced its own backlash: witness the current anxieties about “overdiagnosis” and fears of sharp-elbowed middle-class parents seeking to gain extra exam time for their darlings. None of which provides any succour to families with genuine needs — who now face the additional risk of being assumed to be somehow gaming the system. Meanwhile, the Government’s attempts to improve the woeful attendance figures have shown an almost comical level of misunderstanding. Last year, an advert featured a laughing schoolgirl and the caption “This morning, she was worried about school… but look at her now!” It was widely criticised by those involved. “I can’t begin to say how angry this makes me feel. It is making parents feel guilty. We would love our children to be able to attend school,” one parent told the BBC.
The Newcastle study makes for bleak reading. Based on extensive interviews with hundreds of parents suffering from school distress, it is the first investigation into the effects on parents as well as children. Over half of the parents developed new mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety and sleeplessness, following the onset of their child’s school distress. Almost 79% said they felt they had not been believed by school staff when raising concerns about their child, and a further 47% said they had felt “threatened or vulnerable” while trying to discuss problems with a member of school staff. “This isn’t trivial,” says Dr Mullaley “These parents are dealing with a very distressed child, but they’re also dealing with the impact of that on all aspects of their life. They’re struggling financially in an awful lot of cases, and their mental health is declining as a consequence.”
It is the dismissal of the issue that Mullalley feels is most concerning. “There is such a power imbalance,” she says. “They are threatened with fines and court action and disempowered by the actions of professionals surrounding their child.” The cases can quickly escalate: social services become involved; child protection assessments are undertaken; parents soon find their own motives questioned. “That is such a profound threat.”
In Michelle and Charlie’s case, the situation became worse before it became better. “At the beginning, there is self-doubt and you think that the professionals must be right, and you question everything you do,” says Michelle. “But then there is frustration, because there are so many professionals involved in your child’s life, but they don’t talk to each other, and often you don’t get to find out about decisions made about your child.”
Covid, and then a transfer to a special school, only seemed to make matters more dire. Charlie became withdrawn and dysregulated, lost worrying amounts of weight and threatened suicide on several occasions. “I have a therapeutic background and I know that when a person is serious, they can tell you how they’re going to do it,” says Michelle. “That was really upsetting – that, and the fact that when he started to lose weight, I had no control over it. I couldn’t make him eat, and I couldn’t keep him safe… And all the time you feel people are judging you. Is he being difficult or are you being soft?”
The costs are not only borne by parents — who are in many cases thrust into full-time care roles. When a child is in difficulties, their parents may apply for an education, health and care plan (EHCP) assessment from their local authority. This can attract extra funding and practical support. However, the number of parents applying for an EHCP has doubled during the past eight years — and now half a million pupils have one in place. Councils’ budget deficits accrued on SEND spending are expected to rise from £2.4 billion to £6 billion by 2026, according to the County Council’s Network (CCN).
Such is the demand that only around half of the applications for care plans are processed within the regulated 20 weeks. When SEND support is not approved by local authorities, parents can appeal to a tribunal at a further cost to councils. Last year, 98 per cent of these appeals were upheld. The system is in a shocking mess, but rather than address the failure, the Government has instead floated proposals which would remove education, health and care plans (EHCPs) from children altogether.
Parents often end up in Kafkaesque nightmares as they negotiate this bureaucracy. Catriona Magee’s autistic son, Adam, 14, had been out of school for two and a half years when the local council wrote to insist that he actually was in “full-time education”. In reality, Catriona could not find a school that would take him. Adam was in his bedroom, retreating further into himself.
“It was institutional gaslighting and it blew my mind,” Catriona tells me. “I think it would break many people. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was a mother and I had to keep going, I can see why people would top themselves over this.”
By this point Adam had spent years trying to fit in at schools that couldn’t — or wouldn’t — accommodate his autism. “How he copes depends on the environment he’s in,” says Catriona. “If he’s in the right environment and he’s comfortable, you would think he’s fine. But if he’s in the wrong environment, he can’t function at all.”
In common with many students, Adam’s problems exacerbated after the second Covid lockdown in October 2021. She would manage to get him out of the door but he would be sweating and stressed by the time they reached school. “He just couldn’t get through the door, or he’d get towards the door and then he would just run or he’d hide under a bench or he’d start spinning round and round.”
“Parents often end up in Kafkaesque nightmares as they negotiate this bureaucracy.”
He wouldn’t attend school regularly again until March 2024. During this time, Catriona engaged in a series of administrative and legal challenges with her local authority and meanwhile was forced to abandon a masters in social work and give up her regular job, meaning her household income effectively halved.
“The whole thing is so isolating,” she says. “No parent wants their child to have problems. No parent wants their child to be ‘the disruptor child’ stuck at home with no future. All I want is to get on with my life, to have a job, for my son to be happy, for him to be learning, to have friends, and to have a future. That’s all I want. And it shouldn’t be that much to ask, but apparently it’s impossible.”
As isolated as parents feel, the experience is common enough for it not to be a simple issue of individual failure. Something, clearly, has gone very wrong for many, many British children. The system is clearly no longer fit for purpose. Ellie Costello founded the group Square Peg, after her two children experienced school distress. Since 2019, she has seen the Facebook support groups for affected parents rise from 1,000 to 73,000 members, with many sharing similar stories. “We are seen either as pointy-elbowed and entitled golden ticket seekers for our little emperors, or we’re feckless and ignorant people who don’t value education and keep our kids out of school,” she says.
She is one calling for an overarching change to the education system, with actual clinical supervision built into schools in order that teachers can get on with teaching. “Teaching and schooling is one of the only front-facing key worker services that doesn’t have clinical therapeutic supervision built into it,” she says. Under the current system, it is effectively left to the schools. Some are sympathetic and handle the problem well. Others make the matter far worse.” There is currently no overarching guidance on what best practice looks like and what the worse-performing schools can learn from the better ones.
This may sound like more resources. But as with so many of Britain’s problems, the failure to address it at source means that we waste billions further down the line. Meanwhile, we have hundreds of thousands of children spending time that they could be learning, playing, socialising — being children — isolated, miserable and traumatised in their bedrooms, and their parents slowly descending into debt, misery and quiet desperation. It’s a tragic waste. I have twice asked the Department for Education to respond to the study and to ask whether it would consider providing the training and support professionals so clearly want. Depressingly, it has failed to respond.
