A personal story
Every year throughout secondary school, I received letters about my daughter’s attendance. They came with red warning boxes, bold fonts and increasingly serious language about the “negative impact” her attendance would have on her grades.
But there was a problem with the assumption behind those letters. For my daughter, attendance and achievement were not positively correlated.
She never attended secondary school full-time. Not once.
Not because we didn’t value education. Quite the opposite. We knew that forcing her to attend an environment so profoundly mismatched to her neurotype was causing significant harm. She was experiencing physical pain, distress and shutdowns, and was using enormous amounts of energy simply trying to cope with being there.
The accommodations she needed had to be fought for. They were inconsistently applied, and even when they were in place, they were often not enough. So full-time attendance was not something I could ethically insist on.
By the end of sixth form, she barely attended at all. And yet, during that time, studying independently from home and with minimal school support, she moved from a D to an A in her mock examinations in one subject. Another teacher understood her exceptionally well and continued to support her from afar, and she achieved an A* in her coursework.
Yesterday, she collected A-level results that anybody, anywhere would be proud of.
And here is the uncomfortable truth: Those results would not have been possible if she had been forced to attend full-time.
For my daughter, reducing attendance didn’t reduce her educational progress. It made learning possible.
I am not arguing that reduced attendance automatically produces better outcomes, or that attendance doesn’t matter. My daughter’s experience cannot tell us what is true for every child. What it does challenge is the assumption that increasing attendance will necessarily increase achievement.
Because attendance is not the same thing as access to education.
A young person can be physically present in a classroom and still be unable to learn. They may be overwhelmed by sensory input, exhausted from constantly masking, unable to process what is being taught, or using so much energy simply trying to remain regulated that there is little left for learning. Conversely, a young person learning from home may be significantly more regulated, able to concentrate and able to engage with their education.
So perhaps we need to ask a different question: Are we measuring attendance because it is easy to measure, rather than measuring whether a child is actually able to access and benefit from education?
Of course attendance matters. Being able to access school, relationships, teaching and opportunities can be incredibly important. But attendance is a means to education; it is not the education itself. For some neurodivergent children, increasing attendance without addressing the barriers that make school inaccessible can actually reduce their ability to learn.
Sometimes reducing attendance is not a retreat from education; it is an accommodation that makes education possible.
We need to rethink the pressure we place on neurodivergent young people to attend environments that are inaccessible to their neurotypes, because sometimes the path to educational success looks nothing like the attendance graph schools are sending home.
And sometimes, reducing attendance is not giving up on education: It is what makes education possible.
Research backs this up
My daughter’s story is not an isolated case. Over the past few years, there has been a growing body of research exploring the experiences of neurodivergent young people who struggle to attend school. Increasingly, researchers are asking a more fundamental question: what is it about the school environment that is contributing to this distress and non-attendance?
And when you start looking at the research, a pattern begins to emerge:
In one study of young people experiencing school distress, 92.1% were identified as neurodivergent, with 83.4% identified as autistic (Connolly et al., 2023). Among those with 0% attendance, the proportion was even higher, at 95.7% (Fielding et al., 2025).
Other research begins to shed light on why. Studies of emotionally based school avoidance (EBSA) have identified factors including bullying, peer rejection, non-inclusive teaching practices, sensory stress and disciplinary policies that penalise neurodivergent ways of being in the world (Hamilton, 2024).
Fielding et al. (2025) similarly identified sensory differences, uncertainty, social challenges and a lack of neurodiversity awareness among the factors contributing to school distress and attendance difficulties.
The picture that emerges is of an education system that is often built around neuro-normative expectations:
Fisher et al. (2025) describe neuro-normativity as central to an inaccessible, anxiety-evoking system, with inflexible structures, inadequate support and expectations that can contribute to rejection, distress, illness and ultimately non-attendance.
Taken together, this research challenges the idea that persistent non-attendance can simply be explained by parents not caring enough, not trying hard enough, or failing to get their children through the school gates. Instead, it points towards a much more complex interaction between the young person and the environment in which they are expected to learn.
That does not mean the professionals working within these systems do not care. Far from it. There are many incredibly committed and compassionate teachers, support staff and other professionals who genuinely want to do the right thing for the young people in their care. But good intentions, however genuine, are not enough to override structural pressures, gaps in training and unconscious bias. Even when the mechanisms for reasonable adjustment are in place, parents regularly have to fight to ensure those provisions are actually put in place for their child. Often, schools do not act until a child reaches crisis point, and even then parents may need to advocate strongly, citing legal duties, to secure change.
This should not be necessary. Yes, schools face genuine constraints around funding, staffing and facilities. But individuals and institutions still have agency within those constraints, and good professionals can and do challenge those barriers.
And perhaps there is a bigger question here:
If the default environment is consistently inappropriate for a significant minority of the people within it, should we really be relying on individual adjustments to make it accessible, or should we be changing the default environment itself?
Education matters. So does safety.
None of this is to argue that young people do not need education, or that attending school is unimportant. There is good evidence that prolonged absence from education can have significant consequences, including poorer educational outcomes and unemployment later in life (Nordin et al., 2024).
The question is not whether education matters. It is whether we are sufficiently willing to distinguish between being present in an educational setting and actually being able to access an education safely. That distinction matters enormously.
The factors identified across these studies, including sensory overload, uncertainty, social difficulties, bullying, inflexible expectations and a lack of understanding of neurodivergence, can make school extremely difficult for some young people. This can lead to distress, shutdowns and meltdowns. But these responses are too often seen as bad behaviour, defiance or a lack of motivation, rather than as signs that a young person is struggling and has reached their limit. When distress is treated as a behaviour problem, the response can make things even worse. Fisher et al. (2025) describe how, when young people do not feel safe being themselves at school, withdrawing from school can become a way of protecting themselves.
And this brings us back to the question at the heart of this article: What if the absence is not the problem we should be trying to solve first? What if it is the signal that something about the environment is not working?
Much of the research and professional discussion to date has focused on understanding what causes school non-attendance. There is now, however, a small but emerging body of work asking the more useful question: What can we do about it?
McDonald and Pervez (2025) reviewed research into approaches used to support children experiencing emotionally based school avoidance. They found very limited evidence about what actually works. Of more than 2,000 studies considered, only seven met their criteria, and two of these were later excluded because of concerns about research quality. One recurring theme across the research they reviewed, however, was a “punitive education culture in response to absenteeism” — a bizarre choice of potentially anxiety-inducing approach when the evidence increasingly suggests that anxiety, distress and a lack of safety are at the heart of many children’s difficulties attending school.
From fixing the child to changing the environment
Perhaps most importantly, this emerging work is beginning to challenge approaches that locate the problem entirely within the child. Instead, it asks us to consider what happens in the interaction between the child and their environment.
That shift changes the question from:
“What is wrong with this young person, and how do we get them back into school?”
to:
“What is happening in this environment that is making it so difficult for this young person to learn?”
I have long advocated for precisely this shift: away from locating the problem solely within the person and towards understanding the mismatch between the environment and the individual neurotype. I often use the analogy of plants and animals placed in environments in which they cannot thrive. When something struggles to grow, we do not automatically conclude that there is something wrong with the organism. We ask whether the conditions are right for it to flourish.
The same principle should apply to education.
If a young person is repeatedly telling us, through distress, shutdown, burnout or non-attendance, that their educational environment is not accessible to them, the most important thing we can do is listen.
And perhaps the next step is to stop asking how we can make neurodivergent young people fit the system, and start asking how we can make the system fit the young people it is supposed to educate.
Until that happens, parents should not be penalised for protecting their children from an environment that may be causing them significant harm. As parents, we need to protect our children.
Let’s make school a place we no longer need to protect them from.
That is when attendance figures will change.