Supporting students who are experiencing school attendance difficulties or distress about school?
Struggling to understand why they can’t go to school?
Concerned that school reluctance is escalating to school can’t?
If you’re unsure why they can’t go to school or they are going reluctantly it’s time to get curious. Become a detective and conduct a stress investigation with your junior detective (aka student).
The Student Stress Investigation (SSI) can help you identify whether your student is being impacted by school-based stressors and what those stressors might be.
Each of the 96 cards in the SSI describes a difficulty that students might experience at school. Work through the cards and discover clues to help build a picture of your student’s stressors. Finding clues is just the beginning though. Once you know what the stressors are, then you can respond in a way that reduces stress and supports the student.
The SSI is a handy tool for school well-being, school attendance teams, psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists and counselors.
Purchase a set of cards as part of the comprehensive Student Stress Investigation Professionals package and you have everything you need to get start finding clues and stress busting.
Supporting Neurodivergent students?
Neurodivergent students are vulnerable to school related stress. They carry a higher stress load than their peers. The chronic nature of this stress can impact their mental health and school attendance. The ability to identify stressors and reduce them helps us create the best conditions for the student to learn in and avoid burnout.
The SSI allows students to have a voice and communicate about their lived experience of school. The information from the SSI can be used to plan supports and inform the content of individual learning plans.
About the term “school refusal”:
The Student Stress Investigation (SSI) was developed with students who are experiencing distress about school in mind. “School Refusal” is the term that has been commonly used in the past to refer to situations where a student can’t go to school. On this website I choose to use language about school refusal that aligns with the language preferred by the lived experience community.
In Australia “School Can’t Australia” (a national parent peer support group) prefers the disruptive term “school can’t” as this reminds others that children and young people are not willfully refusing to attend school- this is not a misbehavior. Instead, the inability to attend school is conceived of as being a natural response to the experience of stressors, commonly experienced within the context of school but also experienced in the context of family or community. Other terms preferred by the lived experience community include: “school attendance difficulties”, or “school distress”, with some referring to “emotion based school avoidance” (EBSA).
The language we use matters. Language both reflects, and influences, the lens through which we view the problem. It influences whether we see the problem of school non-attendance as being: a parenting problem, a mental health problem, a disability problem, due to psychopathology, due to wilful misbehavior or as a response to underlying stressors. Furthermore the language we use influences:
whether we respond with curiosity or judgement,
whether we place responsibility for solving the problems associated with school attendance difficulties with parents, children or schools,
whether doors for collaboration with parents are opened or closed,
the nature of the interventions we conceive, and
whether parents/carer and students feel shame and whether this impedes help seeking and recovery.
I reject the term “school refusal” and you will observe me to more commonly refer to either “school attendance difficulties” or “school can’t”. My choice of language reflects a trauma informed, neuro-affirming, social model of disability and what I have learned about the autonomic nervous system.