A bridge from home to school
Virtual engagement has emerged as a powerful bridge between avoidance and access. For students who can’t face school, online spaces can serve as a stepping stone back to education, not a replacement for school, but a safe pathway toward it.
Virtual environments can reduce the barriers that make school overwhelming:
- social anxiety,
- sensory overload,
- transport challenges, and
- fear of judgment.
Students can engage online at a pace and level of visibility that feels manageable—starting with a camera-off chat, progressing to interactive sessions, and eventually returning to school in person. This gradual exposure reflects a key therapeutic principle for supporting anxious or avoidant behaviour. Virtual sessions provide space to rebuild trust, grow relationships, and develop confidence long before a student re-enters the classroom.
A trauma-informed perspective
When we view school refusal through a trauma and anxiety-informed lens, the narrative shifts. Instead of asking, “Why won’t they come to school?”, we more curiously ask, “What’s getting in the way of them feeling safe enough to attend?”.
Safety and connection must come before attendance or academic progress. Re-engagement requires being understanding, curious, flexible, and using relationship-based approaches that meet students where they are, and increasingly, that means meeting them online.
Once this trust and feeling of safety is established with these students and their families, facilitators can begin to work towards what is called educational recovery. This is the process of beginning to regain the ability to learn again, which assists building positive mental health and happiness.
In the majority of cases, these students want to learn but they have temporarily lost their ability to access learning due to increased anxiety or trauma. The important thing to realise is that as educators, we can change this.