‘School days are the best days of your life. Right?’

I have to say looking back, that my own experience of living through my school days was perhaps a ‘bit of a mixed bag’, particularly secondary school. Moving from a small, rural, primary school of one hundred pupils and joining a large secondary school with over seven hundred pupils, and having to adjust to several different teachers and classrooms every day was very challenging, and my transition was not an easy one.

I suffered from terrible separation anxiety and missed so many of my former primary school friends who had gone to different schools. I became nervous and insecure and developed anxiety with many physical symptoms that included a churning stomach, constipation, and even at times diarrhoea. My appetite was affected and I became painfully thin. My sleep was greatly affected as well, and I suffered from terrible insomnia. I can recall faking illness many times to try and be excused from school for just a few days' respite. 

Perhaps my early experience may resonate with many young people who likewise struggle when they transfer to a new school. 

As an integrative counsellor now working within secondary schools, I am seeing many young people who are unhappy and at times feel very reluctant to attend school and others whose attendance record is poor. I also know personally several parents who face the daily challenge of their child refusing point blank to go to school. 

The Department for Education UK cite the current absence rate across all UK schools as being 6.6 %, but contrast this with the figure for 2016/17, before the Covid-19 pandemic, when the average absence rate for all schools was 4.5%. 

To put the current absence rate into numbers, BESA, the ‘British Educational Suppliers Association’, calculates the current number of pupils enrolled in UK schools to be 10,633,485. My, admittedly dodgy, mathematics skills, calculate 6.6% of this number, the current school absence rate, to be 701,810 pupils, who are potentially not attending school at any one time which to me seems a high number. It's maybe a reasonable assumption then, that for many of these young people, school days are perhaps not the best days of their lives.

So has the Covid-19 pandemic caused the rise in school absence rates?

The experience of having lived through the pandemic is still reasonably fresh within most of our memories and arguably the reality of enforced homeschooling due to lockdowns has impacted school attendance figures. Children who were home-schooled during the pandemic missed out on valuable socialising opportunities with their friends and other young people and on opportunities for personality and identity development at a crucial time in their lives not to mention the severe drop in confidence many suffered as well.

Imagine children who were in primary seven during the pandemic and who had to transition into secondary school perhaps not even having had the chance to say goodbye to classmates, arriving into a new, massively changed school environment and having to cope also with mask-wearing and social distancing. Can you remember the ‘five-metre’ rule? 

I struggled with my transition into secondary school and that was without the social upheaval that Covid-19 caused, it should therefore come as little surprise to us that many young people have struggled with adapting back into normal school life again.

So, are there other issues that young people also face that can contribute to absenteeism and which impacts their secondary school experience making it either ‘a mixed bag’, or one that they will want to forget if they can?

Bullying is undoubtedly a problem and research by the ‘Anti-Bullying Alliance’ has found that some 40% of young people have experienced bullying within school during the past twelve months. 

So, what can we as adults do that will help our children deal effectively with bullying if they encounter this at school?

I currently work with several young people who have experienced bullying.

Part of the joint work that we do is to try to develop our confidence and self-assertiveness to the point where we may be able to say to a bully ‘I am not fighting and I will go to my form teacher if you don’t leave me alone’, which hopefully avoids conflict.

Maturity recognises that fighting risks injury, suspension from school or worse, expulsion. Maturity also recognises, however, that there are times when self-assertiveness alone cannot stop bullying, which is when we turn to the school's anti-bullying policies. I have found these to be robust and very helpful and they are generally available for parents to read on their school’s website.  

I believe that bullies only maintain their power over a young person when they do not seek help from a parent, a teacher, the school safeguarding lead, the school counsellor, or another responsible adult. I believe that it is also important as a carer and parent that we check in regularly with our children that all is well at school and that we use a direct question to check if there is bullying going on, “Is anyone bothering you?”  

If our child says, “No”, does their body language match their answer or does our gut instinct tell us that something does not seem quite right?

Sometimes young people can be reluctant to tell anyone that they are being bullied, fearing that this will only make things worse. However, in every case of bullying that I have been made aware of when counselling in secondary schools to date, when the bully has been exposed and the school's anti-bullying policy employed, the bullying has always stopped.

The simple fact to remember here is that the bully needs to be 'outed' to the school authorities either by the young person or by a parent or guardian.

I believe that it has also been an important observation while I have been working in secondary schools, that confident children seem to be popular and are rarely the target of bullying. 

So, what then makes one child confident and popular and another anxious and tentative?

In counselling terms, we think that conditioning is one important factor. An example of this simply means growing up in a loving and secure home where ‘good enough’ parents can help their children become confident and secure in their world with the knowledge that if I need help, ‘my mum and dad have got my back’.

Encouraging and supporting our children to become involved in extracurricular activities from an early age could include perhaps football, sports, swimming, scouts or guides to name just a few, can also help our children to learn social skills and to gain and grow in confidence.

A bit like building a house, if the foundations are strong, the house will stand firm against practically all that nature can throw against it.

Similarly for the bully, conditioning that they may have experienced could be seeing repeatedly how anger and intimidation are used by an adult perhaps in the home situation such as sadly witnessing domestic abuse by one parent against another. Some young people may also see safety in becoming a member of a gang which uses the weight of numbers to bully and intimidate other young people. There are likely several different reasons and counselling can also help young people who have bullied other young people to explore their behaviour and how this developed.

Many children in school are also dealing with the reality of parental splits and divorce and how this has impacted their young lives.  As parents, many of us will try to protect or insulate our children against our own troubles which might mean not sharing information with them about our partnership frictions until perhaps the last moment when a relationship split occurs.  

I recall one example where desperate parents who were no doubt trying to protect their child brought them on an outing that the child mistook for a picnic to tell them that they were splitting up.  

Our children will be impacted by their parent's mental ill health. It is highly likely that both parents in such a situation where their relationship is on the verge of dissolving, will be highly stressed and their cognitive functioning severely affected.  

In some other cases I am aware of, young people are sadly all too well aware of the impending split up of their parents’ relationship due to frequent arguments overheard within the home.

I believe that young people are usually able to cope better if they feel respected as young adults and parents share with them honestly the reality of strained relationships. I think that it is vitally important that parents also explain to their children that it is not their fault if mum and dad are going to split up and that their love for them has not changed. 

The loss of a parent from the family home, a primary attachment figure that we have built a strong bond with over the years, whether because of separation, divorce, or even sadly death, can be devastating for a young person to deal with if this is not managed carefully. In some cases, reactions may be extreme leading to self-harming behaviour, cutting, not eating, becoming anorexic, overeating, picking at skin, or engaging in suicidal thoughts. There are many others. 

Other children may sadly have experienced trauma within their lives, physical, sexual, and emotional, all of which can impact greatly their confidence and ability to cope with problems in their lives.

Think also of a young person who through no fault of their own has found themselves living in foster care and who has lost not only their parents and perhaps siblings, but also their home and, in many cases, their school and school friends as well. How challenging must transferring to a new school be for them?

Some children may also have strong autistic tendencies and can struggle with adjusting to having to socialise with large numbers of fellow students as well as sensory overload which can be due to noise, smells, and colours. Other young people perhaps with ADHD, (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), may struggle to concentrate within the formal structured setting of a secondary school where increased independence and maturity are expected, which can prove intimidating. 

There may also be many other individual factors that impact greatly on young people’s ability to thrive within the school environment, and which can dent their confidence making them vulnerable to being targeted by bullying.

For example, we have only just touched on the impact of a parent's mental ill health on children and young people. Parents too suffer from mental ill health and are affected by depression, stress at work, post-natal depression, and severe anxiety which affects physical health. There are doubtless many others.

Counselling services are now thankfully becoming more commonplace within secondary schools and help is available if young people need this. As a parent, you can request counselling for your child directly from their school. Young people can also ask for counselling themselves. 

CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) are also available within primary school settings but can also work with young people up to the age of eighteen. Your GP can also help with referrals to CAMHS or other mental health support and you should speak to them if you have concerns.

Counselling can help young people to manage their emotions when they have had to face trauma within their lives, and a suitably qualified counsellor can become a temporary secure attachment figure, helping them to develop safe coping strategies and to figure out a road map that will let them get on with school and family life.

Counsellors can also teach young people anxiety reduction techniques such as controlled breathing and progressive muscle relaxation, as well as how to become more self-aware in life of the things that make us feel good and those that make us feel bad, and how then to practice increased self-care in our lives to boost our mental health. Teaching journaling to record our thoughts and feelings can also be an excellent way of monitoring our mental health in real-time.

We all want school days to be among the best days in our children’s lives. Having an awareness of and understanding of some of the problems that our young people may be facing will allow us to react in an effective way and to either help them ourselves if we can, or to get them the help that they need to cope when things are going wrong.

I hope that if you are a young person who is currently finding school life difficult, or a parent who is worried about their child, that this article has proved useful in some small way and given you some ideas that can help you moving forward.

Remember, counselling can change lives. If this is something that you think you or your child need to do, please, reach out to a professional.