School Can't Experience Trailer

We strongly believe as an organization that kids do well if they can, that our children are doing the best that they can, and that it's not a willfulness.

It's not a, a misbehavior.

And when we subscribe to that belief about our children, it changes the way we see them, and we move from being frustrated with them or using rewards and consequences to gain compliance to being curious about what's going on for them.

That's Stephanie Westfall, director at School Can't Australia, outlining the belief this whole show is built on, and it's why we call it School Can't and not school refusal.

Look, it's a deliberately disruptive term.

It doesn't roll off the tongue easily, but we use it because it's a reminder that we're reframing the way we view school attendance difficulties.

In the past, it's been viewed as a failure of a parent or a failure of a child or young person, a student blowing things out of proportion.

Yeah, so it's really pushback against those sorts of attitudes.

Yeah.

This isn't defiance.

This is a child who is struggling, and it's really important to make the distinction between can't and won't.

Yeah, we start asking why, and the why is everything.