Across the country, thousands of children have stopped going to school. As cases of emotionally-based school avoidance surge, more young neurodivergent people are being left behind by the education system.
While her classmates took their seats and teachers called out the register, 14-year-old Rosie* was still in bed with her duvet pulled over her head. She wasn’t asleep; she just couldn’t face the thought of getting up.
“She was hiding herself from the world,” her mum, Mary, told us. Since schools reopened after the Covid-19 lockdowns, Rosie’s attendance had steadily fallen. The idea of putting on her uniform and going into class had become too much.
Rosie, who is now 17, is one of thousands of children in the UK who struggle with emotionally-based school avoidance (EBSA), a pattern of extreme emotional distress around attending school.
The scale of the problem is staggering, with the number of pupils persistently absent doubling after the pandemic. According to a report by the Centre for Social Justice, the number of severely absent students, those who miss over 50% of school, rose from 60,244 in 2019 to 160,497 by the end of the 2025 academic year.
Though absence rates are slowly improving each year, experts estimate that pre-Covid attendance levels will not be restored until an entire cohort of children who lived through the lockdowns has left school.
“When Covid arrived, everything for her was just marvellous.”
Mary, Rosie’s mother
For many young people, returning to school after months at home was a challenge. But for neurodiverse children – those with ADHD, autism, learning disabilities or anxiety disorders – it was often unbearable.
A recent study found that children with autism are 46 times more likely to experience extreme emotional distress around attending school than their neurotypical peers.
“Covid took the pressure off for many neurodiverse children who found school very stressful,” Emma Cohen, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, told us.
“Suddenly, they were in a less stressful environment, which was a lot better for them.” The return to normality wasn’t a return at all; for some neurodivergent children, like Rosie, it was a living nightmare.
Despite some social difficulties linked to her autism and ADHD diagnoses, Rosie was able to maintain a steady attendance at school prior to the 2020 pandemic. “When Covid arrived, everything for her was just marvellous,” Mary explained.
She explained that time away from school allowed her daughter to relax and removed all the social worries she was facing. But when classrooms reopened, Rosie’s social anxiety had bordered on crippling.
“She was very, very anxious,” her mum told us. “There were days where she just stayed in bed, physically ill, in the foetus position under the blanket. Often she couldn’t leave her bedroom, she didn’t shower or brush her teeth, she didn’t do anything.”
As the pressure mounted, Rosie continued to shut down from stress. Staying home brought short-term relief, but it also meant returning would be even more overwhelming. The thought of rejoining a class where she felt both behind and out of place became even more paralysing.
Rosie, like many other young people struggling with school, wasn’t refusing education. She had always loved to learn, coasting through school work and spending time at home researching and reading. The distinction between can’t and won’t is at the core of EBSA, yet it is still misunderstood.
“For children who don’t want to go to school, being told that they don’t have to go anymore would be a relief,” Sarah, a mother from North London, told us.
“But for my daughter, it was devastating.” After months of periodic school absence, Sarah was informed that her daughter Lola, would not be able to return after the Christmas break.
Lola has always been a high-achieving pupil, having earned a place at a prestigious private secondary school with selective entry. Before the pandemic, she had no issues with school at all.
“She was at the top of her class, her attendance was absolutely fine – she loved school!” Sarah said. However, the UK went into the first lockdown just as Lola was set to start Year Seven, disrupting the already-challenging transition between primary and secondary school.
“For children who don’t want to go to school, being told that they don’t have to go anymore would be a relief, but for my daughter it was devastating.”
Sarah, Lola’s mother
For children with ADHD like Lola, the lack of structure and limited socialising opportunities provided by remote teaching made it difficult to adjust and integrate into a new school environment. She struggled with online lessons, often keeping the camera off and staying in bed.
Even after returning to classrooms at the start of the 2020/21 academic year, school had not necessarily returned to normality, with Covid-19 safety measures like face masks, social distancing policies, and limited extra-curricular activities.
While Lola finished Year Seven with good grades and a solid attendance record, she started really struggling in Year Eight. By the end of the academic year, Sarah was used to receiving calls from the school requesting that she be picked up. Lola was able to get out the door most mornings, but would feel awful once there, experiencing extreme anxiety and emotional distress.
“She said she’d been kicked out of school, she was devastated.”
Sarah, Lola’s mother
It was obvious that Lola was too unwell to be in a school environment, but this didn’t stop her from feeling like a failure. “She wouldn’t want to stay at home,” Sarah insisted, explaining that she had refused to move schools or take a year out of education.
By Year Nine, the school had let Lola’s parents know she would be permanently excluded, as they could no longer support her. Her behaviour was labelled as “disruptive”, and the school’s SEN team claimed they couldn’t offer her the appropriate accommodations.
“She said she’d been kicked out of school, she was devastated,” her mum told me. Throughout the Christmas break that followed, Lola would often walk up to the school and stand outside the gates.
Lola’s experience reaffirms a wider flaw with the school system, where SEN children fall through the gaps and are left behind. When she began to struggle in Year Seven, Sarah said the support offered wasn’t sufficient.
“They’d always put it down to bad behaviour, but you know, she was unwell.” Her distress didn’t slot neatly into the school’s priorities, so it became her problem, and then her mother’s. “I think when she was at home, they were relieved that she didn’t have to deal with her.”
It’s a familiar story among parents of neurodivergent children, especially in high-performing grammar schools, where there is often less capacity and willingness to accommodate children with emerging pastoral needs. Even in state schools, teachers describe being stretched thin, SEN departments being overwhelmed, and class sizes only growing.
While EBSA became a more prevalent issue after the lockdowns, many experts and parents argue that the pandemic wasn’t the cause so much as a catalyst for a collapse that was already underway.
“I did encounter emotionally-based school avoidance before Covid, but it became a lot more common after it,” Emma Cohen told us. “I think it would have come anyways, but it definitely escalated it.”
For many pupils, the school system had been failing long before classrooms closed in 2020.
Grace was 14 when Covid entered the picture, but school had been overwhelming for long before that. For Grace, school had been overwhelming long before Covid entered the picture. In Year Nine, a year before the first lockdown, she began pleading to stay at home, showing symptoms of depression and extreme anxiety.
“If I didn’t go to school when I was a child, my parents would be absolutely mortified,” her mum, Julia, told us. She was reluctant to let Grace stay, describing many difficult mornings spent arguing with her bawling daughter outside the school gates.
Grace’s autism diagnosis in 2021 was a huge revelation for her and her family. “Her autism had gone undetected for so long, and this had a huge impact on her,” Julia said.
“She knew she was different, but couldn’t understand why.” The built-up stress from constantly masking her autism became detrimental, inducing several chronic health conditions, which explained the extreme fatigue that Grace had mistaken for depression.
Yet even after receiving a diagnosis, support from the school was scarce. Every accommodation Julia asked for was refused.
Not being put on the spot by teachers? Too difficult to enforce. An option of remote work on particularly difficult days? Not possible. Julia became engaged in a bureaucratic war. “I recently burned two-and-a-half kilos of correspondence with her school,” she confessed.
She discovered that some staff thought Grace’s distress was simply parental indulgence. “They thought I was being very dramatic,” she said.
“That nothing is wrong with her, and I’m just too accommodating,” Julia spoke with patience and composure, but the exhaustion radiated off her. “I had to put myself aside as a person completely.”
Across our interviews, parents described not only the pain of watching their children’s well-being crumble, but the mental strain and isolation they experienced themselves.
Julia had put her own life on hold to support her daughter, confessing she hadn’t read a book in years. Over the years, she’d lost many friends who had become judgmental, often lecturing her about how she wasn’t strict enough with her daughters. “I was really, really scared and I felt very much alone,” Julia admitted.
Mary explained that the pressure she was placed under to get Rosie to school only added to the problem. “It made me the worst mother in her eyes,” she said.
The daily calls to let the school know that Rosie would be absent were so stress-inducing that she had requested to send in texts instead.
“If a parent has tried everything to get their child to school, there’s got to be a reason why they aren’t going,” Emma Cohen, child psychotherapist, told me.
“It’s important to try everything in your power to keep them at school, but sometimes it’s important to stop and reevaluate.” She elaborated that forcing a child to go against their will would be even more detrimental to their well-being and would only erode their vital relationship with their parents.
“I had to put myself aside as a person completely.”
Julia, Grace’s mother
As parents in the UK are legally required to ensure their children receive a full-time education until they turn 18, the local authority has to play a role in supporting families experiencing EBSA.
Some councils have started to help fund private tutoring for children who struggle in classroom environments, which Lola was lucky enough to benefit from.
However, the vast scale and rapid growth of school absence over the past few years have meant that local authorities have struggled to keep up.
“I have never actually managed to get a face-to-face appointment with the council,” Julia told me. “In fact, I think they do everything to deter parents coming for help, mainly because of the financial aspect of it.”
“It’s important to try everything in your power to keep [your child] at school, but sometimes it’s important to stop and reevaluate.”
Emma Cohen, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist
The mental health system also offers little relief. After waiting years to see the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), the NHS mental health service for under-18s, Rosie was denied treatment.
“They refused to see her because she was not considered an emergency case,” Mary told me. Since the pandemic, CAMHS has been overwhelmed with a huge rise in referrals, with tens of thousands of children and young adults waiting for several years to be seen.
Without an assessment, the family couldn’t access an Educational, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), which would open the door to tailored support. As private assessments are often out of budget for most families, costing over £1,000, waiting is the only option.
“They refused to see my daughter because she’s not suicidal, but her problems could lead her to being suicidal one day if she doesn’t receive treatment,” Mary said, her voice drained.
“How can somebody say that to a mother who is struggling? After that call, I was in shock; it really felt like we were on our own and nobody was going to help us.”
Persistent absenteeism has serious consequences. The Department for Education stresses that students who are persistently absent in secondary school could earn £10,000 less than students with good attendance.
The Centre for Social Justice also warns that the current school absence crisis could result in almost 200,000 school leavers at risk of falling into unemployment.
Emma Cohen told me that most young people who struggle with EBSA struggle to recover and return to any form of education.
This has sadly been the case for Rosie, who managed to take her GCSEs independently, but then stopped attending college after three months.
“She was so happy to have passed her GCSEs,” Mary told me. “She applied to study video game design at college, and she really tried, but then, again, the social aspect became too challenging.”
“It really felt like we were on our own and nobody was going to help us.”
Mary, mother of Rosie
Yet some children manage to break out of the school avoidance cycle with the right support and environment.
With the help of home tutors, funded in part by her ECHP, Lola was able to complete her GCSEs and is now enrolled at a sixth form college.
Sarah described how she had never been told about the many alternative education options available, and instead had to seek out information on forums with other parents with children struggling with EBSA.
“Once I looked at these forums, I thought, ‘wow, there’s a whole world out there for home education that we are not aware of because we just go to school’.”
Similarly, Grace completed her GCSEs at a pupil referral unit, an alternative education institution, with the help of home tutors. After two tribunals, she was granted a scholarship at a private college where she’s working towards her A-Levels.
The smaller class sizes and pastoral approach of her have provided Grace with the support and confidence that she was stripped of at her previous school. “She’s super happy in this college, she’s improved so much,” Julia told me, her voice finally lifted. “All she needed was kindness.”
If the right support can transform a child’s future, perhaps the first step is to finally recognise the crucial difference between can’t and won’t.
* The names of all parents and young people have been changed at the request of the families interviewed to protect their privacy.
Featured image by MChe Lee via Unsplash