Fiona McFarlane on the significant relationship between children's mental health and educational attainment

Before joining Place2Be in March, I worked at The Promise Scotland and I’ve found a striking similarity between work to improve educational attainment and work to keep the Promise to care experienced young people.

High levels of support, significant political ambition and leadership, lots of flowers blooming all over the Scotland, but perhaps not on a wholescale basis.

For our part, Place2Be puts mental health practitioners into schools in Scotland to work with children, teachers and families to provide support early and influence the school and family systems around the child.

We help children understand their emotions, open up about their feelings and listen to what they tell us they need to thrive, including academically. If there was an area of work that exemplifies our focus on listening, it’s our work with young people who aren’t in school.

It’s an issue at the forefront of many minds right now, from headteachers through to government. It is no exaggeration to say that Scotland is facing an absence crisis in our schools: government data shows that 32.5% of children were persistently absent in 2022/23 – missing 10% or more of school. In comparison, in England – where persistent absence is also at crisis level – this figure stood at 21.2%.

At Place2Be we’re thinking deeply about what it means for us – how we meet the needs of children who struggle to attend and those that support them.

A significant part of the uptick in school absence is the rise in emotionally based school avoidance, which occurs when stress exceeds support, when risks are greater than resilience, and when pull factors that promote school non-attendance overcome the push factors that encourage attendance.

Resources are a huge challenge right now, but there is much that schools can do to support attendance. And we would be very clear that whilst for some children remote learning is right, for the vast majority school is an important stepping-stone to adulthood.

One of the questions we often ask is really simple: what does it feel like to be late and what does it feel like to be absent? Sometimes when you listen to young people it can, for them, feel better to be absent than late – we must get to a place where it is better to be late than absent.

So we need to ensure children have a ‘good welcome’ because even the simple relational, facial expressions and judgements surrounding being late are significant enough to deter attendance for an anxious child. It is not that we take away all the barriers (that’s not what life is like) but by focusing on punctuality are we making it harder for some that already find school overwhelmingly hard? We need to ask: are we listening to them in our way of being at the start of the day?

It is then that we have to consider specific supports and mental health interventions. Place2Be currently has two projects, in Dundee and South Ayrshire, working specifically with children struggling to attend, meeting them in community spaces with the clear intention that we can support transition back into school.

Some learnings from that work include:

• 1. Get in early. If a child has totally disengaged, it’s really hard to build relationships and encourage some sort of support. We must make sure that our mental health support is ready when attendance starts dipping.
• 2. Systems, systems, systems! There are great CBT tools that can really support anxiety reduction and integration, but we cannot locate the entirety of children’s problems with them. We must work with the systems around the child, both family and school. Listening to what children are telling us has to mean doing things differently.
• 3. Leaving the bedroom and meeting somewhere neutral can be a stepping stone back to school. That could be a library or community space, then meeting with our therapist in school, perhaps out-of-hours or through a different entrance.
• 4. It’s all about relationships. Who in the school does the child know and trust? Counselling can be an important part of reintegration and reducing anxiety, but to support resilient children who are able to learn then relationships in school need to be real, genuine and consistent to help pull them back into sustained attendance.

Our education system faces a number of challenges right now, attendance is just one, we cannot wait for wholescale national change to right the ship. What we can do is listen to children disengaged from education and work as a system to meet their individual needs, in doing so we can get them back on the right course.

Fiona McFarlane is director for Scotland for Place2Be.