Counselling Children and Teens Through School Avoidance

Sarah Davidson

There is something deeply human that happens when you sit with a parent and you can hear the desperation and fear in their voice, the exhaustion, the sadness, and the sense that things are slipping further away, with no clear way to stop it.

That happened almost two years ago when I spoke with a mother who did not know if her child was going to make it through the year. What had started as school avoidance halfway through Year 7 had slowly turned into something much bigger.

By the time I met this mum, her daughter – who I will call Chloe – was now in Year 9 and had not attended school for more than 18 months. What began as a break from school instead created a deeply isolated existence which had become incredibly difficult for the whole family to manage.

I will never forget those first few sessions.

We began speaking online, with mum sitting at the computer while a terrified young person sat off camera, petrified that I might see her face on the screen. Several times, both she and her mum threatened to end the call and never return. Thanks to tenacity, or something of that kind, from Mum or from Chloe, somehow, we persisted until I was able to connect with Chloe on her own.

This would become one of the toughest cases I have ever experienced. Over many months, we worked to understand what had led to her school avoidance and what became clear very quickly to me was the extraordinary power avoidance can have over a young person when they feel unable to manage stress, social pressures, expectations, and the many unseen demands of school life. In this case, we were not even addressing neurodiversity or learning challenges, which are often part of the picture.

For a long time, we barely spoke about school at all. Instead, I discovered an incredibly intelligent young person, an avid reader, full of ideas, dreams, and humour, who was frozen in fear.

The first visit was touch and go. Chloe was linked with a support worker who could visit her home, and she initially spoke to the worker from behind her bedroom door. But there was hope – more hope than we had seen in nine months.

With time, patience, curiosity and consistency, Chloe was able to find the confidence to accept further support closer to home. With the support of her family and services in her state, Chloe eventually began online schooling.

Today, Chloe is in Year 11, attending an alternative school in person and beginning to imagine a future for herself again. I feel incredibly proud to have been part of her journey and even more exciting is that she now talks about wanting to help other young people who experience what she did.

Like many practitioners in this space, I did not set out to specialise in school avoidance. I came across it through my work running a not for profit that supports emotional and social learning for young people. But as I started to take stock of the number of unexplained absences, one thing became impossible to ignore: this kind of distress is not rare.

In fact, it was happening far more often than most people realised, and the language we were using to talk about it was not helping.

Something I hear a lot from parents is the phrase: “My child won’t go to school”.

At first glance, this can sound like refusal or defiance. But when you sit with young people long enough and listen carefully, something very different begins to emerge.

When a young person says, “I will not” or “I cannot go to school,” they are often really saying:

I do not know how.
I do not know how to manage the anxiety.
I do not know how to face the social pressure.
I do not know how to cope with the expectations.
I do not know how to walk into a place where my nervous system feels overwhelmed.

And when adults respond by focusing only on attendance, the gap between what the young person can manage and what is expected of them often grows wider.

This is where counsellors play a crucial role, not in forcing attendance, but in helping young people understand what is happening within them, giving language to their experience and building the tools they need to gradually reconnect with learning and life.

One of the most important shifts in my own understanding of school avoidance came when I began to look at it through the lens of the nervous system. For many young people, school is not simply a place of learning. It can also become a place where their nervous system feels under constant threat.

When the brain perceives danger, whether that danger is social pressure, academic stress, bullying, sensory overwhelm, or simply the fear of not coping, the nervous system moves into protection mode – fight, flight, freeze or shutdown.

In these moments, the thinking part of the brain that allows us to plan, reason, and problem solve becomes much harder to access. Expecting a young person to simply push through or just go to school when their nervous system is overwhelmed is like asking someone to calmly solve a maths problem while their house alarm is going off.

The body is doing exactly what it is designed to do. It is protecting the young person it houses. When we recognise this and explain it to a young person in language they can relate to, it can be incredibly empowering. Instead of asking, “Why will they not go?” we begin to ask, “What is their nervous system responding to?” And then perhaps the most important question becomes, “What would help them feel safe enough to try again?”

In 2022, not long after COVID, I began to realise I wanted to do more for young people experiencing school distress. I quickly learnt that this was one of the hardest cohorts to support because in many ways, I was asking young people to face the very fears that had made school feel impossible in the first place. These kids aren’t against change, but they worry adults will ask them to do the very thing they feel unable to do.

Without genuine buy-in from the young person, nothing really shifts. Young people may return to school temporarily under pressure, but without the skills to manage anxiety, setbacks, and overwhelm, that return is often short-lived.

Real change begins when the young person is part of the process, understands their triggers, builds resilience, becomes part of the solution, and learns practical skills to manage what once felt impossible.

As counsellors, we also need to recognise that many young people need more than talk therapy. Sitting and talking about their experiences can be difficult or overwhelming, and young people often need interaction and practical tools. They need ways to explore what is happening inside them when they cannot articulate it or even have an answer at all.

It was through working alongside these young people, many of whom found it hard to engage in traditional counselling, that the idea for Navigating School Can’t began to take shape.

It’s a simple, interactive workbook that helps young people make sense of their experience of school avoidance, understand what’s happening in their bodies, and start building small, manageable steps forward.

The focus is first on building trust and connection, then opening space for the harder conversations before working on strengths and next steps. The workbook has also been recognised by the Australian Council for Educational Research.

One of the most hopeful parts of this work comes from what we know about neuroplasticity.
Young people’s brains are constantly learning from experience. When a young person has repeated experiences of fear, overwhelm, or failure around school, their brain begins to associate school with danger. In these situations, avoidance becomes the brain’s way of staying safe.

But the reverse is also true, and with the right support, new experiences of safety, connection, and small success can begin to reshape those pathways. I have found this work often starts with very small steps – a short conversation, a visit, or something else that makes the child feel understood. Each step helps retrain the nervous system and build the confidence needed to move forward.

For counsellors working with young people experiencing school avoidance, the work is rarely about attendance alone. It is about listening carefully for what sits beneath the behaviour, with many young people feeling misunderstood, labelled as oppositional, or believing they have somehow failed at something that should be simple.

Counsellors can support this process by:

• Helping young people name what their nervous system is experiencing
• Introducing practical tools for managing anxiety and overwhelm
• Creating spaces where young people can explore school distress without shame
• Working collaboratively with families and schools where possible

Perhaps most importantly, counsellors can help young people rediscover a sense of agency.

School avoidance is often described as a crisis of attendance, but in my experience it is more a crisis of safety. Understanding this does not remove the complexity of the issue. Families, schools, and counsellors are navigating systems that are stretched and under-resourced, but our kids today cannot wait for systems to catch up. When we take the time to understand the young person’s internal experience, small shifts can begin to occur – and a young person who once believed their future was set in isolation begins to imagine it differently.

And sometimes, like Chloe, they even begin to imagine helping others walk the same path.

Author Biography

Sarah Davidson is a registered counsellor and the Founder and CEO of Kids & Teens in the Valley, a not-for-profit organisation based in the Derwent Valley, Tasmania.

With a background in the school system, she is passionate about supporting young people and their families, helping build confidence, connection, safety, and social and emotional wellbeing.

Sarah combines evidence-informed practice with a practical, down-to-earth approach, creating safe, inclusive spaces where young people feel comfortable being themselves.

Her work is shaped by a deep understanding of the challenges faced in regional communities, and through her programs, counselling, and community initiatives, she is committed to making support accessible, relevant, and meaningful for young people aged 6–18.