This chapter explores the importance of understanding the role of anxiety as a barrier to education from a familial, lived experience standpoint. The parental understanding of a child’s complex educational requirements should be better utilised by professionals across all teams to help personalise the best individual pathway for each child. To achieve this goal there needs to be a fundamental shift in the language we use around school refusal, and the implications of such language in the legal context of mandatory education. This chapter also incorporates the various impacts school-based anxiety can have on individual families, examines the legalities of anxiety-driven non-attendance and how wider policy aims are seldom reflected in practice within the current system. Lastly this chapter explores resources for educators, healthcare professionals and parents alike, which have been of personal benefit and which will prove invaluable in advancing the discourse and practice in supporting families dealing with school-based anxiety.

Attendance at school can contribute substantially to young people’s optimal development and long-term outcomes. School absenteeism and mental health problems, which are often intertwined, present a major obstacle to optimal development. This chapter introduces research on the relationship between school absenteeism and young people’s mental health problems, including internalising and externalising problems. Attention is also given to the relationship between school attendance and mental health. The authors then present three lenses through which the reader may assimilate the wealth of data and ideas in this book: the multiple needs of young people displaying absenteeism and mental health problems; a multiple disciplinary approach to responding to these needs; and a multi-tiered system of supports for conceptualising, providing, and researching interventions to prevent and address school absenteeism and mental health problems.

The range of terms that are associated with school attendance, and in particular school attendance problems, is surprisingly difficult to define and reach consensus upon. This chapter discusses socio-political considerations in relation to the terminology used to describe school attendance problems and indicate where absence from school is considered a problem. There is discussion drawing upon relevant literature about particular terminology, including the categorisation of attendance as authorised or unauthorised. The chapter introduces the relation between conceptions of school refusal and truancy to emotional and behavioural mental health difficulties. It acknowledges the overlap in the ways these key labels in the field are understood and the complex association of different aspects of mental health difficulties with school absence that might be due to distress, defiance or a mix of different individual factors. Given the influence of factors beyond the individual student, such as parent-approved school withdrawal or exclusion due to behavioural concerns, I argue that a whole-school approach should be taken to attendance that can also be considered alongside other inter-related work on behaviour, health and wellbeing, and school climate.