 I get asked a lot how can we help this child who is struggling to go to school and it's a great question one I love to try and tackle with families with schools with all sorts of different people but it's the wrong first question if we've got a child who's not attending who's finding it really hard lots of anxiety and emotion around school then we need not first to think about well how do we overcome that we need to go back a step and try and understand the why why is this child finding school a struggle what is not working for them is it something to do with school is it something to do with home is it something internal is it something external the problem that we've got here is that emotionally based school avoidance or school anxiety or school phobia or whatever phrase we want to use and none of them feel right quite honestly whatever we're calling it a child who's struggling to go to school it can look quite similar from child to child but child a's reasons their issues their concerns their worries the things that's making it hard for them to go to school might be totally different than the concerns for child b but it kind of looks the same but if we treat them the same what might work for one child might not work for the other child a might find school totally overwhelming perhaps they are on the autistic spectrum and school for them is too noisy in every sense of the word and they find it really really challenging and the whole thing sends them into a spiral of anxiety and panic and overwhelm and it's just too hard whereas maybe for child b they're really really worried about being away from home because there's challenge going on at home and they're worried that if they're not there to keep things safe to keep an eye on things to look after siblings or a parent or a carer or what have you that that's a concern for them and then maybe there's child c who has got mental health concern perhaps they've got obsessive compulsive disorder and this makes getting to and into school very very challenging because they've got obsessions and compulsions that are driving them to do other things and taking their focus away from the school day there's like so many different things that could be underlying this and yeah could probably list a hundred different reasons so many different things but the point is if we don't know what the problem is if we don't know what is stopping this child from making it into school from thriving at school from enjoying school from being able to go there do that and and enjoy it and love it if we don't know the why for them then it's really hard for us to focus on the how to help so first we've got to find ways to work out the why and that can be a whole another video a whole another guide if you find that helpful do comment if you've got ideas on that do comment but just my first point here before we think about how do we help we've got to define what are we trying to help why is this child finding it hard