Part 4: School Can’t - Beyond School Refusal: What Capacity, Trauma, and Exclusion Are Telling Us
- Chloe Storrey
- Apr 4
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 24
We’ve all heard the terms school refusal and school avoidance. But recently I came across the phrase school can’t, and it immediately shifted something for me. Because when we say refusal, it sounds like a choice. When we say avoidance, it sounds like anxiety. But when we say can’t, we start asking a very different question:
What is happening in this child’s system that makes school feel impossible right now?
I’ve written before about what sits below the surface of the iceberg — the nervous system overload, burnout, anxiety, sensory overwhelm, social exhaustion, learning differences, and trauma. I’ve also talked about the judgement families face, and the strategies that often don’t work. But the question that keeps coming up is this: what do you do when your child truly can’t go to school?
Do you pull them? Do you push through? How do you balance burnout with the fear of falling behind? How do you advocate in a system that was never designed for all kids? There isn’t one perfect answer. But I do think we need to start looking at this through a different lens — one grounded in the nervous system, trauma, and capacity.
What school can feel like for some kids...
For many neurodivergent kids, school is not a neutral environment. It can be a place of constant demand, constant noise, constant social navigation, and constant correction. Over time, this can become chronic stress.
School may involve:
Constant sensory input
Complex and unspoken social rules
Executive functioning demands
Masking all day
Anxiety and perfectionism
Feeling different
Exclusion or subtle bullying
Never fully getting to relax
This is not one big traumatic event. It is often thousands of small moments that add up over time. Being corrected all day. Being told you are too much, or not enough. Feeling overwhelmed every single day. Living in fight/flight/freeze for years. This is how trauma can develop in school environments, especially for kids whose nervous systems are already working harder than everyone else’s.
Exclusion, microagressions, and the power imbalance
We also need to talk about the social environment kids are navigating. Bullying is often imagined as obvious and overt, but in reality, especially in schools, it is often much quieter than that. It can look like exclusion, whispering, eye rolling, moving seats away from a child, leaving them out of games, group chats, and birthday parties. Each incident may seem small on its own, but bullying is not usually one big event - it is a pattern and a power dynamic.
Many of these experiences fall into what we now call microaggressions — subtle, sometimes unintentional behaviours or comments that communicate exclusion, difference, or judgment.
Research consistently shows that repeated exposure to microaggressions is linked to anxiety, depression, chronic stress, and trauma, especially among marginalized groups, including people with disabilities and neurodivergent individuals. Many neurodivergent children, anxious children, and children who are different in any way are often placed in an unfair position - expected to tolerate mistreatment rather than having the environment shift around them. Instead of adults stepping in to address group dynamics, increase inclusion, or interrupt patterns of harm, the responsibility is often placed on the child who has the least power in the situation.
We need to acknowledge: not all children can navigate complex social dynamics on their own. Especially when those dynamics are subtle, unspoken, constantly shifting, and rooted in social hierarchy. For some kids, the rules of friendship and belonging are not obvious - they are confusing, exhausting, and at times, impossible to decode.
This is why common advice like “just play with someone else,” “tell them to stop,” or “be more confident” so often falls short. These responses assume a level of social understanding, regulation, and power that many children simply do not have in those moments. It is not support - it is a quiet shifting of responsibility onto the child who is already struggling.
And when we zoom out, bullying is rarely one big, obvious event. More often, it is a pattern. A power dynamic. A repeated experience of being excluded, dismissed, or made to feel unsafe or unwelcome. These patterns are easy to miss when we look at moments in isolation, but very clear when we begin to see the full picture of a child’s experience (and often one that is not easily understood or articulated by the child). So the question becomes - as parents, how do we advocate not just for our child, but for broader, school-wide social inclusion? How do we know if School Can't is partially rooted in social exclusion?
Part of the answer is pushing for proactive, structured approaches to social dynamics, not just reactive responses to incidents.
Two programs that can support this are:
UR Strong — a friendship skills and social-emotional learning program that helps children understand the language of friendship, conflict, and inclusion. It gives kids and educators a shared framework to talk about relationships, rather than relying on vague or assumed social skills.
LEANS (Learning About Neurodiversity at School) - A free curriculum designed for pupils aged 8–11 that introduces the concept of neurodiversity and explores how it shapes students’ experiences at school. The program aims to build understanding, develop more positive attitudes toward neurodiversity, and encourage inclusive actions within the school community.
These kinds of programs matter because they shift the focus away from “fixing” individual children and toward changing environments, building understanding, and creating cultures of inclusion.
Because ultimately, this isn’t just about stopping bullying. It’s about making sure that children, especially those who are more vulnerable, are not left to navigate social survival on their own.
Where trauma comes in....
I hear this a lot — that kids need to toughen up, that they need to go through hard things so they can handle the real world. But this idea sounds logical on the surface and is actually quite counterintuitive. It doesn’t line up with what research tells us about stress, learning, and nervous systems, and it certainly isn’t trauma-informed or inclusive. We understand children and mental health far better than we did years ago. We know better now, and that means we need to respond differently.
When a child is already overwhelmed, repeated negative experiences don’t build resilience - they build stress, shutdown, and trauma. Negative experiences also tend to have a stronger impact on our memory than positive ones, especially when they happen over and over again.
Many of these kiddos also experience 'Rejection Sensitivity.' Rejection sensitivity is not reduced by repeated rejection; it is often intensified, especially for neurodivergent nervous systems. When someone experiences rejection over and over, the brain and body begin to expect it, turning social situations into places of threat rather than connection. What builds resilience is not more rejection, but experiences of safety, repair, and being understood after moments of difficulty.
I recently listened to Dr. Ross Greene speak, and one idea stayed with me: our world is lacking empathy. Empathy is not something that just develops automatically. It is a skill that needs to be modelled, practiced, and intentionally taught. When empathy is missing, misunderstanding fills the space and the kids who are already struggling tend to carry the impact of that the most. We need to do better at teaching empathy, and I wonder, how is this impacting what we are seeing in schools?
Demands must match capacity
One of the most important ideas in all of this is simple: Demands must match capacity. Otherwise, overwhelm is inevitable.
Changing schools only helps if the problem is addressed. What matters more than the name of the school is whether there is:
Flexibility
Reduced workload
Emotional safety
Sensory accommodations
Understanding from adults
Support with social dynamics
We need to meet kids where they are now - not where we think they should be.
Because kids cannot learn when they are in survival mode. Learning requires a regulated nervous system. It requires safety. It requires challenges that feel manageable, not constant overwhelm. A child in shutdown, burnout, or fight/flight is not in a state where learning can happen, no matter how good the teacher or curriculum is.
Protect the nervous system first
When everything feels hard, the answer is often not more pressure. Often it looks more like:
Reducing demands (shortened days, flexibility, choice)
Protecting energy
Focusing on connection at home and at school
Supporting regulation
Prioritizing mental health
Letting go of the idea that everything must look typical right now
Understanding how trauma impacts kids and reducing their experience of it
When I look at the adults I work with now, and the kids who are struggling in school today, the connection is very hard to ignore. Sometimes when a child can’t go to school, it isn’t the beginning of a problem. Sometimes it is a nervous system saying no earlier - before years of burnout, masking, illness, and self-blame set in.
Because maybe the goal is not just school attendance. Maybe the goal is:
Kids who feel safe
Kids who don’t grow up believing they are broken
Kids who become adults with functioning nervous systems
Stay tuned for Part 5 where I talk about the lessons we need to learn from the adults. The final part in this (seemingly never ending) series, and one I hope supports your intuition,
so we can all listen to our kids, believe them, and parent out of understanding, compassion, and not fear.
School Can't Australia - https://www.schoolcantaustralia.com.au/
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