23 July 2025

Join us as Tiffany Westphal and Louise Rogers, co-directors of School Can’t Australia (SCA), share their views on why some students experience distress around school attendance. Tiffany and Louise discuss how school attendance difficulties are often a protective nervous system response to chronic stress, especially for neurodivergent students. This episode provides insights for school leaders, wellbeing staff and classroom teachers looking to better understand and engage with students and families impacted by attendance distress.

Show Notes

• School Can’t Australia
• We’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode and any ideas you have for future topics. Get in touch with the Teach Podcast team at education.teachpodcast@sa.gov.au.

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome to Teach a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we are joined by the two directors of School Can't Australia, Tiffany Westphal and Louise Rogers. Welcome to you both.

Tiffany Westphal: Good morning.

Louise Rogers: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Now, we're at Stronger Connections 2025, which is a peer connection development and collaboration event for wellbeing leaders in South Australian schools, and you are talking to educators and support staff about attendance and the reasons and influences behind a young person's ability to attend and their motivations behind attendance. Can you tell us a little bit about why you started School Can't Australia?

Tiffany Westphal: School in Australia was started by parents for support of parents about 10 years ago. Back 10 years ago, the environment was fairly hostile towards families who were experiencing difficulties with children who were quite distressed about attending school. Lots of parents felt quite judged and lots of the advice that people were given was rather unhelpful and resumed that children were misbehaving, or parents were weak parents and enabling anxiety or not using rewards and consequences adequately.

So it was in that context that the group was formed, and we really created a safe bubble for our community of parents and carers to navigate this really challenging situation that they found themselves in and to try and learn about what, we really began to co-create knowledge by sharing with each other what our experiences had been and what worked and what didn't work in this space. So there's been a lot of knowledge co-creation over the past 10 years, yeah.

Dale Atkinson: So what do we know about what influences a young person's anxiety around attendance. What are the factors that feed into that?

Tiffany Westphal: So we see it as a stress response to things that are happening either in the context of the community, the family or the school. And so there are lots and lots of reasons why a young person might be finding it difficult to come to school. And so we talk about capacity and how their nervous systems have been impacted by those experiences of stress.

Dale Atkinson: What influences a young person's attitude towards schooling? What are the stresses that are impacting them when they're making these decisions?

Tiffany Westphal: I think all kids want to attend school, but something happens along the way in their experience of school that's caused them to feel unsafe there or to feel incompetent or to feel that they don't belong or that they're just exhausted from the effort. About seventy to eighty percent of our community are caring for young people who are students with disability – so autistic, ADHD, neurodivergent kiddos and people and teens who are finding school quite stressful.

Louise Rogers: I think it's also important to recognise that the stresses – they're accumulating. They're coming from multiple places and they're stacking. So students are going to have more than one difficulty that they're experiencing across all the different contexts of their life. But I mean, in school, there are a number of different things which can stress the student out.

They might be having difficulty with their mathematics, or they may be experiencing bullying in the playground, or they may find it difficult to go to the toilet or to eat lunch at school. There's so many different stresses and we need to take a very individualised approach to working with children and young people about what makes it hard for them to go to school.

Dale Atkinson: So what's the role of the school within trying to address some of these inhibitors that young people have?

Tiffany Westphal: I think we need to be really curious, and we need to listen very carefully to the things that students are telling us about their lived experience of school. It's tempting for us to presume that school is safe, that we are taking care of everybody's needs at school. But for lots of our kids, their needs are not perceived – there are barriers to us being able to identify what's going on for them that's causing them distress.

Like Louise said, often when we look at the data from our survey of families and we look at school-based stressors on average, you know, of the 57 school-based stressors that we asked our community about, people indicated that about 8 of those were factors that had contributed to their child's experience of distress in relation to school.

I use a resource called Student Stress Investigation and it’s a box of cards with 96 different school-based stressors and on average the students I work with as a social worker are choosing between thirty and fifty of these cards and saying these are things that are causing me distress. And there's a range of things from the sensory experience of the space. So it's a mismatch between what I have capacity for and what the demands are, what the expectations are.

Louise Rogers: Around 30% of our parents and carers indicated that stresses in the context of family were impacting their child's attendance difficulties, and those were things like relationship breakdowns, or losses, like the loss of a loved one, or having to care for an ill parent or relative. So, I think in terms of how schools can respond to that is I think to be cognisant to those things that are going on when they’re of what's going on and to give that young person some space to have those hard feelings and to be going through those experiences.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it seems like there's a couple of elements to this, one of which is an understanding of the context of the individual child and then creating space and time to listen and respond. What are the practical tools that individual teachers and whole schools should be deploying in this space?

Tiffany Westphal: Look, I think we need to have resources that help students tell what's happening for them. I think when you just ask a student, "What's up?" It's often difficult for them to tell you, and there's lots of reasons why that might be the case. You know, they might not have the words to explain what's going on inside them. They may not have the language to make sense of it as a nervous system response.

That may have internalised lots of really sorts of messages about themselves, you know, “I’m a bad kid because I’m not going to school. I’m failing to meet everybody’s expectations that I attend school. I’m not comfortable at school, but I don’t understand why I’m not comfortable at school”. And so, when using resources like card sorts enables kids to consider a prompt and say, "Oh, yes, that thing, that bothers me. You know, the lights in the classroom bother me or I can't eat at school and so I'm having trouble managing my blood sugar levels during the day when I feel cranky in the afternoons and have trouble concentrating, or I'm not feeling comfortable using the toilet, so I avoid drinking so I don't have to go to the toilet at school. I'm not comfortable being called on by the teacher to answer things when I haven't volunteered information”.

So there's lots of little things that often reduce the student's capacity to feel okay and safe in that space. And we really need to be curious about all of those things and explore lots of things. And sometimes it's quite a process and it takes some time. So as students' distress levels start to drop, we might discover more things that they weren't able to tell us before because I start to feel safe, but I think the biggest barrier is having them feel safe enough to explore those things with us.

Dale Atkinson: Now you both advocate for approaching school attendance distress through a neurological lens rather than as a misbehaviour or psychopathology. Can you explain the distinction between those approaches and what that means for how a school or an educator should be thinking about attendance?

Tiffany Westphal: So when we're thinking about it as a misbehaviour, we're responding to behaviour and trying to shape behaviour through use of rewards and consequences or threats. This is often the first port of call that lots of families resort to, my kids resisting going to school. So I'm going to try and incentivise them to go to school.

But when the students experiencing lots of stress, they're asking them to just try harder, doesn't provide them with the support that they need. When we look at it through the mental ill health lens, School Can’t Australia has come to understand that anxiety and depression do co-occur with difficulties attending school, but the mental health issues are often like smoke is to the fire and we need to understand why the house is on fire and respond to that – and that's often because of stresses.

When we experience chronic stress for long enough, it impacts our mental health and our capacity to be able to manage ourselves and make use of coping skills and strategies that we have. When you try and self-advocate for your support needs and your support needs aren't understood or you don't understand what to ask for that you need, there's a barrier there, and so things don't get resolved and problems persist.

Louise Rogers: When we treat it as a stress lens, it gives us different strategies that we can use to respond. It helps us get to the root cause of what's going on for that child or young person. Changing behaviour is just changing what the distress looks like. It's not getting to the underlying reason.

So we really do need to problem solve that. And we need to understand that the things that we're seeing, if a child's hiding in the toilet, if a child's running down the street, if we treat this like a behaviour, we're going to have a very different response to that than if we understand it to be a protective response of the nervous system.

Dale Atkinson: So Louise, it strikes me that the response at a school-based level is fundamentally different if we approach it from the perspective of misbehaviour or even as a psychopathology. We have behaviour structures, we have allied health supports that we've been put in place, but if we step back and we think about this through the neurological lens, essentially what we're saying is we need to seek first to understand what's influencing that young person.

Tiffany Westphal: I think we need to tune in to what the nervous system state is of that student and recognise that fight/flight looks like that behaviour that you see, you know? It looks like somebody not getting dressed in the mornings. It looks like somebody not able to get out of the car when they get to school. It looks like somebody yelling at a parent or being oppositional. It looks like somebody who's having a meltdown at school because they're distressed by something that's happened, avoiding seeking to get away from something that's a fight/flight response.

What's hard for us to see though is that some of these students end up in a shutdown response and that's almost invisible often to the people who are trying to support that student. You don't see behaviour often when somebody is shut down, you'll see somebody who is sometimes dissociated, sometimes just waiting for it to end, trying to go unnoticed in a state of distress that they're not able to communicate that they're distressed. Often parents get told, "Well, they're fine at school because I've seen them and they don't show any signs of distress." But we need to be curious about whether they are in fact a distressed student.

Dale Atkinson: Now Louise and Tiffany, the relationship that the school has with the parents, really critical right across the board, but particularly when it comes to difficulties that any young person's having in any aspect of their education. What is the stance and attitude that educators should have in discussing these issues with the parents and how do we support parents in this space?

Tiffany Westphal: I think we need to remember that parents and carers are often very stressed by this experience. There's a lot of messaging out there in the world about the importance of attending school, and so they can feel quite anxious for their child, that their child's missing school, but they're also juggling lots and lots of things at home. Difficulties getting to work if, they can't drop a kid off at the gate and get to work, or if there's difficulties leaving the house so it can be hard, it can impact your employment.

When you have a child who can't leave the house, it means that you become housebound when they're young or if they're older and they're old enough to be left at home. If they're mentally unwell, you can't leave a child who's self-harming or in distress at home by themselves. So it can really change your life and change your connections to the community. It means that you are seeking supports that sometimes aren't there and sometimes those supports you get on a waitlist to see someone and they give you advice that's just take them to school, you know, and that's not helpful.

It's advice that's misunderstanding the nature of the distress and as something that a student should just be able to push through. But these are kids usually who have pushed through until they can no longer push through. So we're not just talking ordinary everyday anxiety, we're talking severe chronic stress situations. So it's quite stressful and our research shows huge impacts on parents and carers, mental health and physical health and wellbeing, as well as their finances and their personal resources and their connections within the community.

Lots of conflict often between family members about how best to respond, how best to support a student between coparents but also between extended family too. So it can become a topic that a parent can't speak about in their circle of support because people are just not understanding the nature of school attendance difficulties as a stress response and think it's a behavioural response, you know, they're manipulating you or they're just pushing boundaries, and you need to push back harder.

Louise Rogers: I think it's also really important for schools to recognise that when parents haven't had a lot of advice that hasn't been helpful to them or their experience hasn't been recognised and validated in conjunction with the stress of all those things Tiffany just spoke about, we can end up being quite traumatised by this experience and lose trust in the systems that we are meant to go to to find support.

Tiffany Westphal: It's important that we remember that parents have nervous systems too. And so the parent that you say that you're dealing with is also experiencing nervous system distress, you know, fight, flight or shutdown and has a lived experience of this as well that has impacted their nervous system.

Dale Atkinson: So where can educators and families go for more information?

Tiffany Westphal: So School Can’t Australia offers PD and training for educators and professionals, but we also provide support for parents and carers. So we have some resources on our website, schoolcantaustralia.com.au and we run a Facebook page as a closed peer support group for parents and carers. So some downloadable resources as well that you can share with parents and carers.

Dale Atkinson: And we'll include some of those links in the show notes. Louise, Tiffany, thank you very much for your time.

Louise Rogers: All right, thank you.

Tiffany Westphal: Thank you, thanks for your interest.