'All the advice about having rhythms and routines — none made any difference' for child avoiding school
Fiona*, a mother to an autistic child, told the ‘Irish Examiner’: ‘I am not an outlier. I don’t know what it would have been like if I had known he was autistic when this started, but somebody should have picked up on the signs.’ Picture: iStock
At the age of nine, Conor* was often described by his teachers as well behaved and polite. He was in third class in early 2023 when he first started to tell his mother Fiona* he couldn’t go to school. He is the youngest in his family, and Fiona never had any concerns about his siblings at the same school.
Fiona holds two masters of arts degrees. However, like everyone else, she struggled through homeschooling during lockdown.
When Conor first started telling her he didn’t want to go to school, she wasn’t immediately concerned.
“I thought initially I didn’t really have an issue with one or two mental health days,” she told the
But his upset escalated quickly, going from feigning illness — usually a tummy ache — to experiencing worrying psychological distress.
“He was very, very distressed at the time. [It got] to the point that I had to take him to the GP, because he was talking about throwing himself out the window,” she added.
Twice, he snuck home and hid in his room. In the mornings, he started to become unresponsive — almost like he couldn’t hear or speak.
“Early on, I realised that there was something more going on than just a child deciding ‘I don’t feel like going to school today’,” she said.
Fiona wouldn’t have known it at the time, but she would later be threatened with prosecution over her son’s school attendance.
After two years of engaging with the educational welfare services and trying every strategy proposed to get Conor back to school, even when it seemed to be causing him more harm than good, he received his autism diagnosis.
Throughout, Fiona was repeatedly told about the damage to Conor from missing school days. Once he was identified as having complex educational needs, and had a recommendation to attend an autism class, there were no places available.
Fiona wishes to highlight her experience with the educational welfare services now in the hopes of highlighting how the approach to addressing long-term absences potentially is damaging to other neurodiverse students such as Conor.
“I am not an outlier. I don’t know what it would have been like if I had known he was autistic when this started, but somebody should have picked up on the signs,” she said.
A sharp rise in daily absences post-pandemic sparked a renewed focus here on school attendance.
The Education (Welfare) Act 2000 legally obliges schools to report any child who misses 20 school days or more. This 20-day measurement is the metric used to define “chronic” absences.
Despite a return to normality in the 2022 school year post-covid, the proportion of children deemed “chronically absent” had more than doubled.
It dropped slightly by 2023/24, but more than a fifth of students missed a month or more of school. This drop in attendance rates was highlighted by media, including this reporter, and there were ministerial pledges made in the Dáil to reverse the trend.
Last September, the Department of Education and Tusla launched the Every School Day Counts campaign.
It aims to improve attendance with tips for parents and teachers, attendance drives, and a series of posters with slogans such as “days off cost good grades” and “it’s not ok to be away”.
Regular school attendance is commonly linked to better outcomes all round. However, while there has been much focus on the impact of missing school, there seems to have been little recent investigation yet into the root causes currently driving long-term absences.
The Department of Education and Tusla do not know the number of neurodiverse students currently deemed chronically absent.
Neurodiversity Ireland told the it is directly witnessing the extent of what it describes as a “school breakdown crisis”, particularly among neurodivergent children.
Following the rollout of the national attendance campaign last year, it ran a snap poll. In 48 hours, it collected almost 350 responses. Almost 85% of respondents reported their child was absent for more than 20 days over the last two school years.
“We’re talking about years in some cases,” said Nessa Hill, the chief executive of Neurodiversity Ireland.
“There are children who are out of school years, then trying to get back again and it is not working out.
In Ireland, the terms “school refusal”, “school avoidance”, “school anxiety”, and “school phobia” are often used interchangeably to describe the breakdown that occurs when a student will not attend school.
Advice on managing “reluctant attendance”, published by the National Educational Psychological Service, says there is no single cause of school avoidance.
“Research suggests a combination of complex and interlinked issues can have an impact. Family, school, student and social factors can all play a part,” it said.
However, research from Britain indicates that there is a very common link between school attendance problems, emotional distress, and neurodiversity.
Sinéad Mullally, a lecturer in neuropsychology at Newcastle University, advocates for the term “school distress” instead of “school avoidance”. Like Ireland, there has been a renewed interest in school attendance in Britain following the pandemic.
Documenting the experience of more than 900 parents, Ms Mullally and her team found very significant emotional distress in more than 94% of the cases.
“We had reports of self-harm, and a lot of very harrowing reports of what parents reported seeing in their children,” Ms Mullally said.
Examples of this distress included vomiting, bed wetting, physically lashing out, and even attempting to run into traffic.
Of the students surveyed, almost 93% were identified by their parents as being neurodivergent — with 84% of these students identified as autistic.
“We found that children with diagnosed autism were more than 46 times more likely to experience school distress than non-autistic children. We also found that children tended not just to have one diagnosis. They had sensory processing differences, ADHD, dyslexia. There was a complex picture of need in these children,” she said.
“We advocated for changing the term to ‘school distress’, trying to get away from the idea that this is a behavioural problem, poor parenting, or defiance. It’s a manifestation of really quite significant distress in these young people.”
In Fiona’s case, when Conor’s attendance issues first started, she turned to research, reading everything she could about “school avoidance”.
Advice published by Tusla’s education support service and the Department of Education broadly follows the same principles.
“It tells you to ‘be consistent, don’t let them stay at home’,” she said.
“It says just get them in, don’t let them stay home because it’s a slippery slope. You start saying things like ‘it’s the law, you have to get to school’ and ‘I’ll get in trouble if you don’t go in’.
“You say all these things to your child because there is no other advice out there. I was pleading with him. At one point, I was bribing him; I’d say I’ll give you a euro a day if you go to school.
“That worked for a bit but, after a week or two, he still couldn’t do it. I would always talk about school as if he was going. Not in a threatening way, but I’d ask what he wanted for his lunch tomorrow. If there were things happening in school, I’d say: ‘There’s a bake sale on Friday.’
“At one point, we even baked for the bake sale and he still didn’t go in. All the advice about having rhythms and routines, making sure you had the uniform out the day before, etc, none of that made any difference.
“I realised it was a random pattern. It wasn’t anything to do with what I would say or didn’t say.”
After a year of intermittent attendance, Conor was referred to Tusla’s education support service, and an educational welfare officer was assigned to work with the family.
“I remember when the school told me that [the Tusla service] was getting involved. I thought that was great,” Fiona said.
“I thought the educational welfare officer was a psychologist because, to me, that would be the next logical step.
“The first thing I was told, apart from being lectured about the importance of education, was that home can’t be more comfortable than school. I was also told that children are little rascals, and who would go to school if their parents let them stay home? If I said to my other children ‘you don’t need to go to school, you can stay home, and watch TV, and go to the park’, they would look at me like what are you on?
“It’s not that they didn’t listen to me, per say, but it didn’t make any difference.
“The response was ‘well there’s no problem in school’, so the suggestion was that the problem was at home.
"The message was always that this was really, really damaging to him that he was not in school, because he’s losing out on education and it’s really harmful for him."
She said she would be told things like “well, you definitely don’t want a child in secondary school who doesn’t want to go to school, you need to fix it now”.
“On the surface, that sounds right, but the implication was ‘if you don’t fix it now, he’ll be doomed for life’,” she added.
Throughout this time, she had regular meetings with the service. All the while, Conor’s attendance even started to decline.
“I thought maybe he had ADHD,” she said.
She would describe how he’d become unresponsive in the mornings.
“I know now that this was autistic shutdown. I didn’t know it then, but somebody should have known that this was what it was. All I got was ‘have you tried an alarm clock?’”
Different solutions were proposed to get him back into the classroom, but none eased Conor’s distress.
“The fact he couldn’t go just upset him further. He would think ‘what’s wrong with me, I want to do these things but my body is just telling me I can’t’.”
At one point, with Fiona’s consent, the service and the principal had a meeting with Conor. It made no difference.
Even though Fiona engaged at every opportunity with Tusla, she started to receive letters reminding her that she could be prosecuted if there was no “immediate improvement” in her son’s attendance.
“The educational welfare officer had said: ‘This might take a long time to fix.’ The next week, I got a letter to say that, if we don’t see immediate improvement, there might be problems.
“I remember being very surprised at the language because it was the opposite of how we spoke,” she said.
Another letter arrived as after the Christmas holidays.
“You are obviously on tenterhooks the whole Christmas break because you don’t know [how back to school] will be. Then, you get this letter saying you’ll be fined €,1,000,” Fiona said.
At this point, Conor still had some days he would attend school.
“The goal was always ‘maybe we could get him to do a full week’, and that was seen as a success.”
In January 2025, “completely burnt out”, he stopped going altogether. Conor was also referred to the National Educational Psychological Service.
“Again, I was delighted. I thought that maybe we could now get to the bottom of what’s causing him distress in school,” Fiona said.
“I was told you need to have him doing schoolwork at the kitchen table. I had already tried all these strategies. She put together a timetable for him with reduced hours, which we had already tried and hadn’t worked. This was just before Easter, and she basically said: ‘Ok, he’ll be in school again after Easter.’”
When he didn’t return, school staff visited their home.
“I was told Conor would have to come down and see them. He didn’t. He was up in his bed in a fetal position and completely unresponsive. I said this is what it is like every morning — what do you want me to do?”
Facing a wait of up to 30 months to get an autism assessment publicly, Fiona spent €1,700 to get Conor assessed privately. It confirmed he has complex educational needs, and he needs more supports than a mainstream class.
“For two and a half years, we have tried to shoehorn this child back into an environment that isn’t right for him. We had meetings every two to four weeks for a year. That’s a lot of resources.
“Stupidly, I thought I’d get some validation. I thought somebody would say: ‘Ok, we’re clearly doing something wrong here.’
“It was really harmful, and it shouldn’t have happened.
“The approach was, if I was parenting right, he would be in school. There has been no reflection whatsoever that if it hadn’t been for their strategies and their attitudes, we might be in a different place.”
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For Ms Mullally, Fiona’s story is “shocking but not surprising”.
Most parents who took part in her research ranked school distress as the second-most stressful life event they could imagine, with only the death of a direct relative — including a child — superseding it.
“That’s how threatening this whole experience was. Many parents were threatened with fines, some were taken to court. Some were referred to children’s social services for neglect. That just creates this really adversarial relationship between schools and parents, and a complete breakdown in trust,” Ms Mullally said.
“For a child to be told you have to be in school, the children know this. They want to be in school, they want to be with their friends, they want to be ‘typical’, but it’s the distress that they experience when they get there that stops them from getting there.
“Getting a message on top of that, that it’s really bad when you’re not there, you are just ramping up that anxiety.
“When you are threatening their parents with fines, and blaming them, and damaging their mental health, you are adding an extra layer of damage to that family unit.
“We’ve seen that, in the UK, they’ve gone very much for a punitive, enforcement approach, and that failed because it’s only thinking about how do we get children back into school.
“It’s not asking what’s causing the distress in the first place, and that can add layers and layers of difficulty on top.”
Stephen Moffett, a policy advisor with Barnardos, said there should be flexibility and discretion when it comes to cases like Fiona’s and Conor’s.
“A lot of it comes down to flexibility, making sure we are putting the child at the centre of things,” he said.
“An increase in attendance is positive, but it doesn’t suddenly mean that it is going to go back to perfect attendance.
“That’s the perspective our services would see, and how we would try and work with children in those circumstances.”
There are circumstances where children who have additional needs can’t engage to their full ability without supports, he added.
“At the same time, this mother is being castigated for ‘not doing enough’. The State isn’t doing enough.
“She’s had to go through a private route to get a diagnosis to find the underlying causes as to why her child wasn’t engaging in school.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Education said both the National Educational Psychological Service and Tusla’s education support service “explicitly support” flexible, individualised reintegration plans which are recorded by teachers on the child’s individual student support plan” in collaboration with teachers and parents.
“[The National Educational Psychological Service’s] role is in providing psychological advice and guidance around the child or young person’s needs, [along with] strategies and approaches to support their reintegration/return to school or increasing their time in school.”
Educational welfare officers “work to ensure children receive the support they need”, they added.
- *Not their real names
- Jess Casey is the Education Correspondent for the
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