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Inside the school refusal crisis: how a mother and her daughters survived a broken system

Inside the school refusal crisis: how a mother and her daughters survived a broken system

Caro Giles had to home-educate three of her four daughters when they grew so distressed at the prospect of school that they made themselves ill. Why is our approach to education failing so many young people? There are things Caro Giles will never be able to forget. The moment when Emmie, her “shiny bookworm” of a daughter, crouched “wide-eyed with terror” in the footwell of the car to avoid going to school. Or when another daughter ripped out her eyelashes in distress. Or when she had to carry her eldest, Matilda, then 11, out of the house because she was so scared to go outside. These behaviours, Giles believes, were predominantly caused by the experience and prospect of school. Giles, a single mother of four daughters, watched as Matilda endured a miserable two years in primary school before withdrawing her – making her “electively home-educated” in official jargon. Ada, her second eldest, was mostly home-schooled until 2018, when Giles’s marriage ended and her children had to return to school so she could work more. Emmie, her third daughter, struggled on in primary until 2022 when she became “very ill”. At 10, she had stopped speaking because she found it so challenging to attend lessons. “I feel horrid about my learning,” she once typed into Giles’ phone. When her youngest, Tess, who started primary in 2019, showed similar distress around school, Giles acted quickly to remove her in early 2023. Continue reading...