#1 - Getting to grips with School Can't

In the inaugural episode of the School Can't Experience podcast, host Leisa Reichelt introduces the concept of 'School Can't' alongside guests Tiffany Westphal and Louise Rogers. 

The discussion delves into:

• The intense challenges and emotional distress faced by young people who struggle to attend school including sharing personal experiences,
• Why we say 'School Can't'  instead of 'School Refusal',
• Understanding the nervous system, the importance of addressing the root causes of distress, and the role of adults in providing a supportive environment,
• Common stress factors in school environments,
• Practical strategies for parents,
• The importance of preserving the parent-child relationship and co-regulating for better outcomes. 

Useful resources:

• Student Stress Investigation Cards by Tiffany Westphal - https://www.studentstressinvestigation.com.au/
• Lives in the Balance (Dr Ross Greene’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions)  - https://livesinthebalance.org/

Transcript

Leisa: 0:09

Hello, and welcome to the School Can't Experience podcast. I am Leisa Reichelt, and this podcast is brought to you by School Can't Australia. Caring for a young person who's struggling to attend school can be a very stressful and isolating experience, but you are not alone. Thousands of parents across Australia and many more around the world face similar challenges and experiences every day. This is our first School Can't Experience podcast. We are starting off with two absolute legends of School Can't Australia community. Tiffany Westphal and Louise Rogers. Now, if you are fortunate enough to be part of the School Can't Australia Facebook community, these will be very familiar names to you. These are the folk who tirelessly administer the membership and the content for more than 14000 very active members of that community. Now, in our first conversation today, we're going to talk about some of the fundamentals of understanding School Can't, including why do we even call it School Can't? What is going on for our young people when they're experiencing this and how does our reaction help or hinder them? And why are we seeing more young people struggling to get to school these days? Or are we? Let's get started Tiffany and Louise. I'd love for you to give us a little introduction to yourself. What's your background and experience with regards to School Can't? Lou, do you want to kick us off?

Louise Rogers: 1:30

I'm a mum of two boys aged 13 and 16. My youngest has a diagnosis of autism. My youngest has had school attendance difficulties, I will say since daycare, really. I'm also a qualified teacher. When the boys were young, I retrained to be a teacher. I have not been able to work in school since qualifying because I'm a carer for my young person, and I've had to be at home when he's not been able to go to school.

Leisa: 2:03

Tiff.

Tiffany Westphal: 2:04

I'm a mum, of a neurodivergent young person who is 16 years of age. She is autistic, an ADHDer and has learning difficulty. Lots of difficulty with expressing herself in writing. She has dysgraphia. And school has been a particularly difficult experience for her since she was in grade one was the first time that she started to express distress relation to attending school. And she's just entering year 11 this year. I'm also a social worker, and I work in this space. I've been involved with School Can't Australia as a parent initially, and then as a leader in helping coordinate the group, and now as a board member. I think I first joined, I don't know, was it 2019? It was around the same time I think Louise joined a few months before me.

Louise Rogers: 2:56

I joined in 2018 when my young person was in grade one.

Leisa: 3:02

Excellent. School Can't, it's kind of a weird term. I think we also hear of School Refusal as another term. Why do we prefer to say school can't?

Tiffany Westphal: 3:16

It doesn't roll off the tongue very easily, does it, School Can't, but it's a deliberately sort of disruptive term that we've chosen to push back against this idea that our children are willfully misbehaving and refusing to go to school. In using the term School Can't, we're saying these are kids who would like to go to school but can't. More often than not, these are kids experiencing distress in relation to attending school. When we switch from using language around refusal to language about capacity-that focuses on capacity- we're directed to think about the child's perspective, the young person's perspective, and their experience and what's happening for them. Instead of focusing on adult judgments about the nature of the behaviour and what we're seeing.

Leisa: 4:10

And what does school can't look like that makes it different from just like, I don't feel like going to school today.

Louise Rogers: 4:18

Both my young people have difficulty going to school and it looks very different in both of them. My youngest is one who would be in the category of'I want to go to school but I can't'. He wants to get there, but then when he does it's just too much. We see those fight, flight behaviours. He didn't go to school for the last three terms of Grade 1. He wasn't getting dressed. He wasn't getting in the car. He was feeling sick when he got to school, he was having those tummy upsets. In fact, even after we left school, we went back to the car park near school and he said,'Mummy, I'm feeling really, really unwell'. And there was, at that time, no expectation to go to school because we'd left it. But he was still feeling really unwell just being near the school that he used to go to when he was young. And difficulty sleeping.

Leisa: 5:08

Going to bed the night before can sometimes be the beginning of it, can't it?

Tiffany Westphal: 5:11

It occurs across a whole spectrum, from mild sorts of distress through to quite severe expressions of distress. Everything from just verbalized, Do I have to go to school, I don't want to go to school', to quite physical responses in the body. Even to the point of complete shutdown, losing the ability to communicate with people, losing the ability to leave the bedroom, put clothes on, losing the ability to be able to eat. We've been struggling for 10 years with on again, off again School Can't over the full spectrum of this experience from quite mild, you know,'do I have to go to school? I don't want to go to school' right through to loss of capacity to be able to even procure food for herself in the house, or a shower, or taking care of herself that you would normally expect a teenager to be able to do. So, it can be quite debilitating and distressing for carers to see.

Leisa: 6:15

So, on the days when they're not going to school, they're not sitting at home having a party, enjoying themselves right? It's not a victory to not go to school.

Tiffany Westphal: 6:23

No. No.

Louise Rogers: 6:24

My young person is often so very upset, because we're home educating now, but when he couldn't get to school, he'd be very distressed that he couldn't get in.

Tiffany Westphal: 6:34

There's often a lot of shame that they carry in relation to not being able to go because they see other people able to go, and why can't I go? It's not, you know, there's something wrong with me that I can't go to school. And that's really hard to see. My daughter has said to me, that she feels shame every single day of the school year except when it's school holidays or a weekend. So that's a huge burden, that our children carry, that our young people carry. The expectation is that they should be at school. And, we strongly believe as an organisation that kids do well if they can. That our children are doing the best that they can with the resources, knowledge and capacity that they have and the supports that they have around them at home and at school. And that it's not a willfulness, it's not a misbehaviour. And when we, when we subscribe to that belief about our children it changes the way we see them and we move from being frustrated with them or using rewards and consequences to gain compliance to being curious about what's going on for them.

Leisa: 7:52

We've talked about distress, we've talked about fight- flight type situations. What is going on inside our kids when they're having these experiences?

Tiffany Westphal: 8:04

It really makes a huge difference to people to understand the nervous system and to see things through a nervous system lens. That for me, personally, totally changed my world

Leisa: 8:19

and

Tiffany Westphal: 8:19

the way I saw my child. So understanding that in order to be at school and to learn, our children need to be feeling regulated and safe and understanding that safety was not just physical safety, but psychological safety. It was about feeling competent. It was about feeling liked. It was about feeling accepted. It was about not having to pretend to be okay. It was about being able to communicate distress and having people respond appropriately. It was about not being shamed for being distressed or being told that you need to try harder or you just need to push through your distress. Stress is normal and we all experience stress, but for many of our, kids, experiencing school in a way that is chronically stressful. Their nervous systems are heightened and experiencing, you know, fight flight response more often than they should. And when you're in a fight flight response, you don't have capacity to take on learning. Your body's in survival. Your body and brain are in survival mode.

Louise Rogers: 9:26

I think it's also important to acknowledge that stressors can come from multiple places. And they can accumulate, sometimes when you're seeing a stress behaviour, you're seeing a straw broke the camel's back. So suddenly all these things have happened, and the young person just no longer has the resources to cope with this one more thing.

Leisa: 9:52

Something that really helped me understand what was going on was this notion that behaviour is communication, and that the behaviour you're seeing in the child is their way of trying to communicate the distress they're experiencing

Louise Rogers: 10:07

I prefer the term behaviour is information,

Leisa: 10:10

okay.

Louise Rogers: 10:12

because, the behaviour's not always intentional. And behaviour's not always intended to communicate something, although we often look at behaviour and we infer what's going on from what we're seeing. not always right. Assumptions are, are, are, about why we're seeing behaviour is often where things go wrong. Adults making assumptions about children and young persons behaviour. so one of the reasons why it's so important to talk with children and young people about what's going on for them. But not at the time when they're having the difficulty because at that time they're not going to be receptive to us asking more questions because that's just one more thing on top of the stress they're already feeling. We need to wait for a time when they're, when they're feeling calm and connected and when they have capacity to talk with us and have a conversation about what's wrong. I

Tiffany Westphal: 11:10

love that. I think it's so important, that we're mindful of that switch in ourselves in terms of the adult judgment about what's going on and being curious about what's going on, for the child or young person. When we have judgmental thoughts about something, it's communicated in our body language, to the other person. And that then presents a barrier to them feeling safe telling us what's happening but when we're curious, that opens doors for them to be able to share with us and give us information it helps them feel safe. So, yeah, I think the voices and lived experience of our young people is something that we really need to tune in to.

Leisa: 11:55

Yeah, it's such an interesting transformation, isn't it? Because I think a lot of the time as parents traditionally, and maybe thinking about the way we were parented as well, Your first instinct is to come at it from a discipline perspective and just go, okay, I just need to make it really clear that there is no option but to get out of bed, put your uniform on, go to school. That's what I did. That's what you'll do. That's what everyone does. Just do it. And to learn the hard way that that approach will not work. And the reasons for why it's not going to work is just, it's so important.

Tiffany Westphal: 12:37

well, the reasons are that it doesn't identify the stressors and it doesn't do anything to alleviate what's going on, what's causing the stress, what's causing the distress for the child. So when we use rewards and consequences to gain compliance with going to school, we're essentially just saying to the kid, look, try harder, you need to try harder. It's you that's got the problem here and your behaviour is not up to scratch and you need to lift your game.

Leisa: 13:03

Absolutely. Let's talk about some of the common things that are really driving some of this distress at school What would be some of the typical things that kids who are experiencing school can't are struggling with, in a traditional mainstream school environment?

Tiffany Westphal: 13:21

Yeah, look, there are heaps. I think one of the really interesting things, is that members of our community are largely supporting students who are neurodivergent, who are autistic or, ADHDers, or young people who have learning or sensory processing difficulties. In my work as a social worker, I'm often finding that neurodivergent young people are indicating that there are often over 30 different things at school that are causing them stress. Sometimes there's not one single thing. It's a whole lot of little things. And every child or young person has a different collection of stressors that makes up the fabric of stress in their life, at school or at home or within the community. And different experiences of being responded to when they're distressed as well.

Leisa: 14:15

The ability to actually articulate those stressors can vary a lot too, can't it? My son is autistic and only very recently did we discover how much smell affects him because he has just always assumed that everybody is experiencing smells the same way that he is and that he's just not doing a very good job of coping with it. And so it was only very recently that we were able to go, Oh, this is something that's really particularly affecting you. If there's something that is very smelly for him, he can't think about anything else. Definitely not maths. And he really wants to think about maths, but he can't if he's thinking about a smell, it took many years for us to be able to find a technique, which ended up just being like a deck of cards where he could go, this is the most annoying thing for me is smell,

Louise Rogers: 15:04

Tiffany has a resource that she's developed called the Student Stress Investigation and it is a set of cards about the different sorts of stressors that students may experience in school. They range from difficulties with relationships to difficulties with sensory things such as smell and noise

Tiffany Westphal: 15:22

It surprises me how often kids say that one of the difficulties they experience is using the toilets at school

Louise Rogers: 15:27

yeah.

Tiffany Westphal: 15:28

And how they're not drinking in order to avoid having to go to the toilets at school, for a whole lot of reasons. Whether it's the smell, the physical state of the toilets, the noises, fear of being assaulted or, wrongly accused of vaping or smoking. There's lots of reasons. And eating at school is another thing that often comes up. Young people can't eat at school for a whole lot of reasons, whether it's the food changes texture over the course of the day. There's not enough time to eat in the classroom, or it's too distracting and so I forget to eat or I'm put off by the smell of somebody else's salami sandwich, or, just too anxious to eat and I, I can't swallow,

Leisa: 16:11

it seems that this School Can't issue is more of an issue now than it's ever been. Like if you think back to, when we were all going to school, didn't seem to be, as much of a known or acknowledged thing, like kids just went to school. Do you have a perspective on what's going on now?

Tiffany Westphal: 16:39

I'm not sure if that's true, but it does seem like there's a lot more of it at the moment. I think back in our day, there were a lot of kids who were truant from school. Louise and I have often talked about how maybe the only difference between a child who is absent from school without a parent's knowledge and a child who's absent from school with a parent's knowledge is how the child or young person feels. the parent might respond to their expression of difficulty. So if they think that the parent is not going to respond in a compassionate way and it's going to lead to punishment, then they're not going to have an open door to have a conversation with about what's causing them distress and how they are not comfortable at school So I think we also have to look at stress levels in the community, because that impacts our capacity as adults, both as, you know, as teachers in schools, but also as adults at home, supporting young people to be available for those conversations about what's distressing I think schools are really stressful places at the moment for teachers as well as for students. It's really hard for us to find staff for schools because teachers are saying this is a really stressful job and I'm out of here. I think we really need to look at what's happening, what school looks like, for teachers and teacher nervous systems, as well as for young people's nervous systems.

Louise Rogers: 18:12

I went into teaching, believing that, education was about empowerment. It was about giving you skills. Developing thinking skills and critical thinking skills. As a parent coming into school, it got to a point where I felt like school seemed more about compliance a certain way of being and doing. And for me that was a disconnect, a conflict. And I'm still thinking about it. I want my young person to get to a point where he can say, well, the rule might be this, but this has happened, and I need to look at my values to determine what I need to do now. Maybe this is a rule that we need to change.

Leisa: 18:58

School is great for lots of kids. Lots of kids love it. And have an amazing time and have a hugely enriched experience and love it. So it's not that it doesn't work for some kids, I found you need to separate your personal experience of how you went through the education system I came up through a pretty academic tradition and followed all the rules

Louise Rogers: 19:20

mm, mm, yeah,

Leisa: 19:20

did all the things that you were supposed to do at school and judged my value by how good my marks were and so it is, it's a really interesting mind shift when you have a child who doesn't fit that mold to change your value system, your judgment system. Something like that, to be more accommodating. And I think maybe there's something in that. There just needs to be a greater breadth of options that accommodate more children with more different needs.

Louise Rogers: 19:48

I think we need to be a lot more flexible in the way we respond to children and young people. We need to first of all recognise when they're having difficulty. You know, we, we created our policies and rules and legislations and, and we can recreate those.

Leisa: 20:04

And we will talk a lot more in the next couple of episodes about things that we can do in response to the system as it is right now to help support our kids better and give them more options and better support as well. I'd love to ask you, just as we close off now, to think about someone who is just in that really early stage of identifying school can't in their child, they're seeing their child really struggle to get up and go to school. What would you want them to know?

Tiffany Westphal: 20:38

I think lots of us resort to parenting skills that are going to get quick, immediate results. I did things like trick my child into going to school. I did things like, do deals in order to get her to go to school. I did a lot of things that I really regret which damaged our relationship. And so there was a period of, of repair, in order to get her to feel safe. giving me information and telling me things that were upsetting her. The school didn't understand it as a stress response, and their ideas for how to, assist us were to put messaging in the newsletter about attendance, to speak to the kids about how important it is to get to school on time, and to give the child a special job in the mornings at school so that they'd want to come because they had to help feed the reptiles or the frogs or, The first breath of fresh air I got from the school was the teacher who said to me just bring your child to school when you can and try not to get upset with her about being late. It's better that she arrive feeling calm and okay about herself. It's better that you arrive late and she walk in with a calm nervous system. That for me was the first time anybody said something to me at school that made me feel like I had permission to respond to my child's nervous system needs.

Louise Rogers: 22:13

For me there's a couple of things. One is to trust your gut. Because we've got a lot of people telling us that our children are fine or will be fine once the handover is done and once they're in school, um, but

Tiffany Westphal: 22:30

Yes.

Louise Rogers: 22:30

The truth is that often times they're not even from when they're young. So trusting your gut. But the other thing, I have learned so much about adult regulation now, that's the other thing. Children learn to regulate their nervous systems through co regulation with adults and peers. Adults are the ones with mature nervous systems. We can learn awareness and strategies to regulate our own nervous systems so that we can be a calm sounding board for our young people when they are in distress instead of reacting to their distress and becoming distressed by it. And if I could go back in time and be that person when my child was young, that, that would be amazing. But, you know, that's something that I have learnt, along my journey. So, you know, I can, I can do those sorts of things now. I didn't know about it then. but that's one thing I wish I could take back to those moments.

Leisa: 23:36

Two things that really stood out for me there that I really resonate with is Tiffany like what you said about trying to build that trusting relationship between you and the child and protecting that relationship, I think is something that was super important as a learning for me as well. And then Lou what you said about. Trying to be the mature, stable nervous system, even though it can be really hard at times, like for you to be that, that stability and that calmness for them to latch onto when they need it. I think it's super important.

Tiffany Westphal: 24:07

It's so stressful for parents and carers, you know, when your child can't go to school because often it's impacting your ability to get other children to school get to your place of employment on time or get to appointments on time and you just don't know from one day to the next what's going to happen, you know, is today going to be a day that we're two hours late to school and we get there or is today going to be a day that we don't get there at all. So it makes it really hard to plan. And it's also really hard for parents, because you see other people getting their kids to school and people, people shame you. The first response usually is to blame the parent, it's poor parenting. You just need to be stricter. Just bring them in their pyjamas, push harder. So you can become quite isolated, as well. Even just from the simple act of that you're not at the school gate when you're in primary school dropping your kid off. So you're not connecting with community anymore with those little incidental chats you have with neighbours, that you see as you're dropping kids off.

Louise Rogers: 25:10

That's actually another reason in terms of school changing. I think our communication and willingness to speak about school attendance difficulties has changed and part of that is social media and being able to connect online with others because at the school gate, this is really isolating. You might be in the car park or you might not even have made it out of the house. And so, you're not connecting with the other parents, you're not generally seeing this unless there's another parent stuck in the car park with you. But now we've been able to reach across the internet and connect with other parents who are experiencing this with their young person. And reflecting on this and talking on this, we're realising it's far more common than any of us suspected

Leisa: 25:57

Joining that Facebook group was an absolute game changer for me. It was, yeah, it was a

Louise Rogers: 26:01

Oh my goodness.

Leisa: 26:03

What a sanity saver

Tiffany Westphal: 26:04

Yeah.

Louise Rogers: 26:04

Just to see the number of people. Look how many of us.

Leisa: 26:09

Having such common experiences. It's incredible. Okay. Let's wrap up now, thank you so much for coming and sharing your experiences today, Tiffany and Louise. We'll be back in our next episode to take the next step into some practical ideas around what we can do to help support our kids who are experiencing School Can't, um, and really looking forward to digging into that with you very soon. We've popped a whole bunch of useful links into the show notes, including links to the School Can't Australia website, the Facebook community, Tiffany's Student Stress Investigation cards, which are great, as well as a way for you to give us some feedback on the podcast and maybe even volunteer to share your own School Can't experience on a future podcast episode. We would love to hear from you.

Leisa Reichelt: 26:56

And finally, please consider donating to School Can't Australia, your tax deductible donations assist us to raise community awareness to, partner with researchers, to produce resources like webinars and this very podcast which assist people who are supporting children and young people experiencing School Can't. Thanks again for listening, and we'll talk again soon. Take care.

Leisa: 27:18

Thank you.