Photo: RNZ/ Nick Monro
The government's promised crackdown on truancy is creating anxiety among families who say their children cannot go to school.
They are part of a growing "School Can't" community who say their kids are unfairly regarded as wilful school refusers.
Some have turned to an Australian School Can't support group for advice.
They told RNZ that school and health workers must stop blaming parents and accept that some children were unable to cope with school.
The government wants to improve regular attendance and the Education Review Office recently called for more use of sanctions and other action against parents of serious truants.
The review office said 80,000 children missed more than 30 percent of their class time in term two this year and more than half of those surveyed cited mental health as a reason for their absences.
Stacey, the mother of a 12-year-old with autism and Crohn's disease, told RNZ she only recently discovered the term "school can't".
She said the term accurately described the situation for her son who began to struggle with going to school about six months ago.
"It's horrific... He can't get out of bed. He can't move. He becomes very distressed.
"He begs me. He will hit me. He will swear at me. It's just very distressing," she said.
Stacey said in a good week her son would attend three days of school but the toll of getting him there was often extreme.
She said the school was supportive but it did not really understand what was happening and there was a sense of blame.
"There's just no understanding. There's not the compassion. It's almost like a 'toughen up', you know, 'get tougher, you're too soft'. And I've pretty much had that said to me... That's kind of the attitude that I get. Whereas there needs to be kindness, compassion and understanding," she said.
Stacey said her son wanted to go to class, but due to his autism there was a barrier he could not get past and it was unlikely she would persevere with regular schooling.
"Our our next steps, whether we look at health school or home school. The way things are now cannot go on... We will all reach burn out," she said.
David and Francesca were another School Can't family at the end of their options.
David said their teenage daughter's difficulties with school attendance began at age nine, a symptom of her autism, and the school and health systems had not been able to help.
"We would try to get her [to school] even when she was in great distress, crying and screaming, even literally getting into the car was really difficult because it obviously meant she was going to school. Even if she saw a park that was close to the school that would set her off.
"We were effectively told this was a behaviour that our daughter was choosing to do, this was a choice. This was before we knew it's not a behavioural thing, it's actually a nuerodiverse thing. All the punitive measures that we would put in place were going to have absolutely negative impact," he said.
David said his daughter's attendance at intermediate school was about 20 percent, secondary school had not worked out and neither had Te Kura, the correspondence school.
He said he felt anger and anxiety over the government's moves to get tough on attendance.
"They're really missing the point because the punitive approach might apply to a proportion, probably a relatively small proportion, but if you look at the figures, the figures are pretty startling and that's not just people saying 'Oh, you just stay at home'," he said.
Francesca said describing the problem accurately - school can't not school won't - was critical because the wrong description drove people down the wrong route in terms of solutions.
She said fines or similar action from attendance services would increase the stress on the household, but would make no difference to their daughter's school attendance.
The office of associate education minister David Seymour said there was no intention of prosecuting families in these types of situations.
The ministry would not prosecute parents of students who were absent because of chronic illness or health conditions associated with a disability, or who were genuinely engaging with a school and the supports offered, it said.
Support from Australia
A coordinator and founding board member of School Can't Australia, Tiffany Westphal, said New Zealand families were joining the support group.
She said the organisation began in 2014 and its membership had doubled every 410 days until nearly two years ago when it started to limit entry so it did not collapse under the need to support new members.
It now had more than 14,500 members with a further 2500 people on a waiting list to join.
Westphal said it was hard to know if the increase was due to growing awareness of the support group, or growth in the problem affecting children.
She said the group provided much-needed support for families and students.
"It's a very isolating experience for families. There's been a lot of shame in talking about it because it's been framed as a parenting problem. And parents are seen as being ineffective, at gaining compliant behaviour from their children or have been labelled, sometimes by psychologists, as enabling anxiety about school, and no one's been listening to the students' perspective, the students' lived experience of school," she said.
Westphal said the group had increased knowledge about the incidence and causes of School Can't.
She said a survey showed 73 percent of the group's members had neurodivergent children and a further 10 percent believed their children were neurodivergent.
Other work demonstrated the high level of stress many children felt at school - in one exercise students often chose 30-50 different aspects of schooling they found stressful.
Westphal said some School Can't children might cope with correspondence school-type education, but for others that would not work.
"For children and young people who have been chronically stressed for a long time, they often become quite mentally unwell and experience severe anxiety and even depression. And I think in those cases correspondent school is not going to be successful," she said.
"Every child has a different collection of stresses and a different experience of school. You know, for some children it's been about bullying. For some children it's been about being able to read and write or being able to cope with the social demands or being punished for being disabled, not being able to sit still in school, having difficulties concentrating. There are lots and lots and lots of things that impact on a student and it is different for every student."
Wesphal said the group had varying success influencing state education departments.
"We keep talking and our strategy is to educate people about the lived experience for parents and carers and also for young people of this kind of distress in order to help build shared understandings."
Visits from attendance or truancy officers would not help School Can't children return to school, she said.
"Just telling parents or just telling a child or making threats - that assumes the reason for the problem is that either the parent hasn't motivated the child, the child doesn't have motivation, or the child needs to try harder, or the parent needs to try harder and we know that these are not reasons why children can't go to school," she said.
"Lots of the parents and carers who are members of School Can't Australia would deeply love for their children to be able to access education in the context of a school."
