This AVITH in Context webinar focused on the topic of supporting families with school attendance and was facilitated by Karalyn Davies (Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare).
The webinar featured a panel of practitioners, the panel included:
SummaryIn this webinar we heard from Associate Professor Lisa McKay-Brown (The University of Melbourne) and Tiffany Westphal (Student Stress Investigation) on considerations for working with young people who have low school attendance and their families. The webinar explored risk factors and early warning signs for identifying school attendance issues, and explored considerations for having difficult conversations with young people about school. BackgroundSpecialist AVITH practitioners working directly with young people using violence in the home note there are often issues with low school attendance. The PIPA Project similarly found that there is a strong link between AVITH and school disengagement. The stress of getting a young person to attend school can be a big source of conflict for families.
Who is this relevant for?Frontline staff, researchers and policymakers.
Many researchers in the area have noted challenges about suitable terminology to describe the issue of low/non-attendance. There is general consensus that school can’t, school related distress, barriers to attendance, and school attendance difficulties are appropriate terms to use, as they focus on a student-centred approach.
Language such as school refusal, school avoidance, and emotion-based school avoidance tend to ascribe an adult judgement about the meaning of a child’s behaviour.
Students with disability, additional learning needs or specific learning disabilities are more likely to be experience school attendance difficulties than those without. Autistic students and those with ADHD show higher absence rates among older students. Autistic students in particular tend to being experiencing these challenges much earlier on than non-autistic students.
Programs and service responses that focus on attendance for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students must be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander led and acknowledge both internal and external factors. Consensus across the research finds that top down and punitive interventions are unlikely to be successful as they ignore ownership, leadership and action at the community level.
This can look like internalised distress, family-related stressors, stressors related to that specific school environment as well as other community level stressors. School-level stressors include factors such as: Bullying and other peer-related anxieties; a school climate that is generally unsupportive or dismissive, including lower levels of emotional support from individual teachers and policies that don’t allow for individualised responses; and the stress that comes with academic challenges and testing.
Reframing behaviours can assist practitioners in understanding the behaviour differently. It can help distinguish the between misbehaviour and stress behaviour. The Shanker Self-Reg Framework sets out a series of five steps to assist with this, it includes: reframing the behaviour, recognising the stressors, reducing the stress, enhancing stress awareness, and restoring energy.
Research shows positive parent-child interactions are associated with less absences at school. Positive interactions can include parental affection in general, parent-child discussions about school, checking on homework, clear rules including limits on screen time, and parental affection in general. These are all easier said than done, but signal where practitioners might begin trying to support families.
Practitioner can undertake the following actions to support students: Identify stressors and barriers (possibly using assistance of conversation prompts and guides), collaborate directly with schools to assist in finding ways to remove barriers and reduce stressors, actively review effectiveness of changes, and help the student make sense of their journey and progress.
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