As a year 10 coordinator in 2013, high school teacher Craig Hildebrand-Burke began to clock an increasing number of student absences at his school. As he began to contact families, he soon realised that school refusal was becoming “a major presenting issue” for the year 10 cohort at his co-ed Catholic high school in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
Generally, he’d notice absences spiking around assessment time. “The pressure would pick up … and avoidance became the go-to strategy.” He would watch as students then struggled to “regain their footing and then it would quickly snowball into three, four days of time and then weeks”.
