I Was A School Refuser

When I was five, I started school. I was bright and curious and I could already read. At school I was expected to sit at a desk with my orange Words Folder and write sentences, whilst the rest of the class sat on the carpet learning about Jennifer Yellow Hat and Roger Red Hat.

I didn’t like it.

I disliked the hard concrete playground which hurt my knees when I fell and which was full of noisy fast children who seemed like giants. I hated having to ask to go to the toilet and didn’t know what to say to the other girls, who would poke me with pencils when the teacher wasn’t looking. I arrived with my blue Snoopy lunchbox and discovered that the others had Wham stickers on theirs and told me that Snoopy was for babies. I had no idea what Wham was and I wasn’t actually quite sure who Snoopy was either, it was just the lunchbox my mum had bought me.

My days were confusing and unhappy. So many things about me seemed to be wrong. I shouldn’t be able to read yet, I should be making friends but I didn’t know how to connect with the Wham girls. I shouldn’t have a Snoopy lunchbox. My clothes weren’t right either, in some undefined way. Too pinaforish. Everything about me felt wrong.

Life was so different to nursery, where I had felt I belonged and was valued. My parents were worried. They tried to cheer me up with Dairy Milk bars in my lunch box. I had been so excited about going to Big School and joining The Infants, and now I didn’t want to go.

I protested loudly enough that my parents decided to move me to a Waldorf school. There, children weren’t taught to read until they lost their teeth and so the issue of my precocity was postponed. No one was being taught to read, so it didn’t matter that I already could. I spent a couple of happy years painting on wet paper and calling my teachers by their first names.

My middle years of schooling were largely spent in international schools in Botswana and the DR Congo, where things were quite different. The other children came from all over the world, as did our teachers, and our curriculum was varied and interesting — sometimes designed or adapted by our teachers because we were in such an unusual situation. There was no National Curriculum, and no real expectations of standardisation. Many children spoke English as a second, third or fourth language. We had come from many places and we would go back to many places. My ex-classmates now live and work all over the world.

I still pushed against the norm and looked for a way to be different. I would always be looking for a way to push the boundaries of what was expected, and most of my teachers embraced that in me. I did long and complex projects on the Soviet Union, Tudor England and the Civil Rights movement in the USA. I wrote plays, designed board games and played in the school band.

We returned to the UK when I was 13. I went into Year 8 in a large comprehensive school. My expectations were high, I had enjoyed school before and had largely forgotten my experiences when I started primary. When we lived in the Congo, our teachers sometimes talked about how high standards were in the UK and how we might have to work hard to catch up. That didn’t worry me, I liked working and learning. I put on my new uniform, navy blue skirt, white shirt, stripy tie, and set off to my exciting future.

It didn’t take long for the old feeling of wrongness to descend. My tie was wrong. It turns out that everyone tucked the big part in and left the small part sticking out. My bag was wrong. Everyone wore them over one shoulder, not two, and mine was shiny. My socks were wrong, they were long when they should have been short. My accent was wrong, it had become Americanised even though I had never been to America. My background was wrong. Everyone else had been in the same class for years, many of them from primary school.

And my experience was wrong. On my first day, I was asked to introduce myself. I was articulate and confident. I stood up and explained about my life in the Congo, and how my dad had worked for Oxfam. To me, this was something to be proud of. He was trying to make the world a better place, to help other people. I thought they’d be interested.

The class fell about laughing. Oxfam? Musty, second hand clothes?

That playtime, I learnt new words as they laughed at me. Second-hand clothes, it seemed, were ‘scabby’.

I never lived it down.

‘Did you get that from Oxfam?’

The other kids would whisper when I walked past them. Even the ‘nicer’ girls would ask sympathetically whether I ever had any new clothes or whether I had to buy all my clothes from second-hand shops. They didn’t mean it in a nice way. I was a social pariah.

Soon the social rejection seemed to enter into the core of my very being. I felt scabby and scummy, unsafe and exposed. It didn’t help that I found the academic work easy and boring. The only place I had any respite was with the French assistant, who would take me out of the class sometimes because my French was far in advance of Tricolore 2 (French is an official language in DR Congo). I think she was lonely too, surrounded by kids who didn’t care about learning French. We would read Tintin together in the corner of the dining hall, in a sea of empty chairs and tables.

My parents tried to help. They got me moved to a different class. This made things worse. No one ever moved class.

‘Why did you move class?’ I’d be asked as I moved around the school.

‘Do you think you’re too good for us? Don’t you like us?’. I didn’t know how to answer.

Lunchtimes were awful. We were only allowed to eat in our school ‘houses’, which mean with our class and the other class in our house. I had been moved within the same house. My old class were there at lunchtime, and they told the new class about Oxfam. The questions continued

‘Where do you get your clothes? Do your clothes smell? Do you smell?’

I made a friend — I can’t even remember how, but she was quiet and shy, and miserable too. We got the bus together. She’d come from a different school, one which she had loved but had had to leave, I wasn’t sure why. We were in different houses, had hardly any classes together and were meant to eat our lunches separately. We would secretly eat our pack lunches outside, hiding round the back of the school, so as to avoid the firing line of the house cafeterias. We lived in fear of a teacher coming round and telling us off. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they turned a blind eye as we huddled on the concrete steps in our coats, surreptitiously taking mouthfuls of our squashed peanut butter sandwiches.

I was still hopeful that maybe things would change. I’d liked school before. I’d had friends. I told the teachers how unhappy I was, and they asked me questions. Were the other children hitting me? Were they taking my money? What exactly were they doing?

I tried to explain.

‘They ask me questions’

’They run off when I approach them’.

‘They groan if I am on their team for P.E.’

‘They move away when I sit next to them at lunch’

‘They sniff and ask if anyone smells something bad when I approach’

The teachers nodded sympathetically and then asked if maybe I was a bit sensitive and could make more of an effort to fit in. They were sure the other kids didn’t intend to be mean. I didn’t know what to say.

They asked about the work. I was honest. I told them how tedious it was, how we spend time in lessons colouring in and how I felt I wasn’t learning anything.

They weren’t so sympathetic to that. The deputy headteacher told me straight out.

‘You don’t mean easier than your other school, you mean different’.

She was wrong. I meant easier. I was years ahead in most subjects. They tried to help. They put me in a Latin class with the year above, instead of sitting through French. They found me a maths tutor — he had done A-levels already and was spending a year working at the school as an assistant before going to university to study maths. It was okay, but it made things worse with the other children again.

‘Why do you go off to do Latin? Are you a swot? Do you think you’re better than us?’

I felt under attack, all the time. I had nowhere to hide. Walking across the classroom felt like a sniper zone. I was an open target. One day one of the boys casually groped me from behind in the classroom, leering ‘Alright Oxfam?’ in my ear. It didn’t occur to me to do anything except pretend it hadn’t happened. I could imagine only too easily what would happen if I reported it.

‘Are you sure? Could you have been mistaken? Perhaps he didn’t really mean to? Did anyone else see?’

I kept quiet.

At a very deep level, I gave up. I became exhausted, all the time. So tired that I couldn’t make it through the day. I had sore throats and swollen glands. I was sent for blood tests — everything came back clear. Still, I was given a label. ‘Glandular fever’. It was my ticket to not going to school.

Now my life became a roller coaster of emotion about whether I was well enough to go to school. As every evening approached, I would feel the sense of dread and anxiety. Sunday evenings were the worst. Would I be ‘well enough’ to go tomorrow? The problem was that I felt fine at home. As long as there was no pressure to go into school, there was no problem. But when the pressure started — as it did every evening — the fatigue and the fog descended. My limbs felt heavy, my throat ached.

And now, because I wasn’t going a lot, that was a problem as well. The other kids would ask when I did go in.

‘How come you don’t have to go to school like us? Do you think you’re special?’

Being at home was tedious too. My parents were both at work, my siblings at school. Both my parents worked in education at the time, my dad was a MFL teacher and my mum worked in adult education. Having a daughter who didn’t go to school wasn’t part of the plan. I felt invisible at home, keeping quiet in the house alone so that others didn’t know I wasn’t at school. Whole days would pass and I would speak to no one.

I think my parents were told not to make life too interesting at home, in the hope that I would see school as a more exciting alternative. This was before the days of the internet and computers. I lay on the sofa. I made friendship bracelets. I watched lots of soap operas about Australians, usually about country vets or doctors.

I felt guilty, I should be at school. I was wasting my life. I was lonely, and yet had no way to connect with others. I wrote long letters to my old friends, and the responses, when they came, took months. I was so jealous of them, back in a place where they belonged and to which I could never return.

It was hard for me to understand what was going on. I felt okay when I was at home, but the moment I went to school I felt exhausted and wanted to leave. How had my life come to this? How had I come to this? I didn’t know, and it didn’t seem like anyone else did either. The adults around me were mystified. ‘School phobia’ they said. But I wasn’t scared of school. I just hated it.

Everyone tried to help. They took me to alternative health practitioners who swung pendulums over my blood and gave me little packets of pills. It didn’t work.

I studied at home, and I took two GCSEs at the end of Year 9. Maths and French. Two A’s. We moved city, I moved school and things got better, although I did miss a lot of school in Year 10 and 11 as well. I still found lessons largely pointless, although at least here I wasn’t a social pariah as well. More ‘glandular fever’. I studied at home and sometimes at school and got more GCSEs and Maths A-level at the end of Year 11. Academics were never my problem.

I still feel shame when I write about this. I still feel that perhaps those children at my comprehensive school were right, and I was fundamentally the wrong sort of person. That it was my fault for being too different, too clever, too honest, too naïve, for not trying hard enough to fit in. Maybe I really did think I was better than them, and that was the real problem. Just like they said.

I felt like this even though I had an advantage over most children. I had been to other schools. I knew that I could be a social reject in one school, but well-liked in another. I even knew that academic work could be interesting, varied and challenging, and that boredom was not an inevitable part of school. I was academically capable. I knew that my voice could be valued, that I could be more than an inconvenience. I knew that things could be different. And I knew that what was happening at my school wasn’t good enough.

Knowing this didn’t help.

There are children right now who feel the same as I did then. We’re still trying to find out what’s wrong with them, just like people did with me. Now we are likely to label them with anxiety or another disorder, but I wasn’t anxious, except when people tried to pressure me into going to school. I simply felt like an alien at school, and I didn’t want to go somewhere which made me feel that way. I didn’t need therapy, I needed something better. A better way to learn, and people who took me seriously and treated me with respect.

If I could talk to my 13-year-old self, I’d like to say, you know what, there’s nothing wrong with you. You aren’t ill, you are not the problem. Instead, you are clear-sighted, and that characteristic will be useful to you throughout your life. Hold onto it.

I was learning nothing at school, and I was a social outcast. Why would I keep going every day? What on earth was the point? I have never been one to do what I was told, just because everyone else was.

The things we learn about ourselves in childhood are very powerful. Part of me still feels that perhaps there was something wrong with me for not liking school. Part of me still can’t work out exactly what I did wrong, and whether I could have done anything differently. The changes I needed were so much more than extra Latin. I needed an environment of respect, where difference was valued and where my voice mattered. I needed meaningful choices.

I needed adults who understood that not liking school isn’t the same as not wanting to learn. There are many ways to get an education, and no one should have to give up their self-esteem in the process.