Mark Catchpole has been looking forward to returning to school in Melbourne this week — he's got friends to see, hobbies to talk about and big plans for the year ahead.
"I think I'm really excited for school," he said.
But the 15-year-old wasn't always this enthusiastic about going back to the classroom.
A few years ago, Mark was struggling to make it to the front gates each morning.
"I didn't have really many friends to hang out with. I was having trouble making any friends," he told 7.30 from a park in the beachside suburb of St Kilda, where he was practising boxing with John Chellew.
Mr Chellew runs a school refusal clinic, where young people attend conventional counselling sessions alongside physical activities such as boxing and scavenger hunts.
He said referrals to his service had doubled since it started six years ago.
"School refusal is anxiety-based school avoidance," he said.
"So kids who want to go, but find it difficult to go, despite parents efforts to get them there, they still find it difficult.
"It is usually kids who are socially anxious or have separation anxiety or they may have other learning difficulties."
Mark is one of thousands of students around the country experiencing what's referred to as "school refusal".
Mr Chellew said the phenomenon had been growing over the past few years — accelerated by the COVID pandemic — and educators around the country were worried.
"The pandemic has resulted in an increase in youth mental health presentations, we know that — whether it be to GPs, or whether it's to counsellors, or even to site psychiatric services and hospitals," he said.
"So school refusal is a symptom of that general increase in youth mental health problems in the community."
School refusal is considered to be different to truancy as the young person usually wants to go to school but can't due to social anxiety or other issues.
The Victorian Department of Education said 11,825 students were absent from school at some point during 2021 due to school refusal.
It is a small but growing proportion of absences – up from 1.2 per cent in 2018 to 1.8 per cent in 2021.
In Tasmania, severe cases of absenteeism are referred to the Office of the Education Registrar. Its data showed school refusal was a contributing factor in 23 per cent of cases in 2022, up from 13 per cent in 2019.
The impact on families is significant, with parents often having to modify their work schedules to manage having a child at home.
How making home boring became part of the solution
Yolanda Beattie found herself juggling a busy consultancy while managing her then 10-year-old daughter's school refusal behaviour, which manifested in panic attacks that could last days or even weeks.
"It impacted our family through a fair chunk of last year off the back of COVID," she said.
"It's a real fear that certainly my daughter experienced through a lot of last year … a real fear of walking through those doors and spending the day at school."
After many weeks off in term 4, the family found success by working with the school to modify Mala's school day so she could attend for a gradually increasing number of hours.
Ms Beattie also offered rewards, such as a weekend away, that Mala could look forward to at the end of the school week. Turning off the TV and screens on days when Mala stayed home also made a difference.
"Making home boring is a really important part of the recipe," Ms Beattie said.
"They've got to feel like staying home is worse than going to school."
Mala has returned to school this week without incident and the family hopes that after a struggle in 2022 this year will see a permanent change.
"I'm feeling braver each and every day," Mala said.
Patterns once established can be hard to break
Greg Elliott is the director of wellbeing across 80 schools in the Catholic Diocese of Parramatta. He manages a multidisciplinary team of teachers, counsellors and psychologists to deliver a "whatever it takes" approach to get kids back to school.
"In primary school, and in early primary school, if there are any concerns about a young person finding it difficult to get themselves to school, that conversation with the school needs to happen urgently," he said.
"Patterns that are established in primary school are almost impossible to budge in high school."
Strategies deployed by his team range from having friends of the child meet them in the drop-off zone to home visits.
"We make sure that we've thought of any sort of obstacle that could be getting in the way and work together with the young person and with the parents to remove that," he said.
"And the students are part of that conversation."
Dr Elliott said "good attendance" had an agreed definition of no more than 10 days off in a school year.
"As soon as the student has more than 10 days away from school, then that's an emerging attendance issue. That can be the beginning of a pattern that might eventually lead to school refusal," he said.
A parliamentary inquiry has been tasked with looking specifically at school refusal and is due to report in March.
According to the most recent information from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, the attendance rate in the first semester of 2022 was 4.3 per cent lower than the previous year. However, "school refusal" is not captured as a reason for absences.
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