A child being mercilessly bullied in the schoolyard. A student with anxiety and ADHD who struggles to walk into a crowded, noisy classroom. A mortified teen who’s had an embarrassing photo shared with their entire grade.
Such experiences are common. For some kids, they make going to school feel impossible.
It’s called school avoidance, sometimes even school phobia. It happens when school does not feel safe and staying home becomes a form of self-protection.
It is one factor experts say is driving an increase in absenteeism that a CBC investigation has found is happening across the country.
The type of absence that increased the most were reported illnesses, which were up compared to five years ago in every district that tracked them. In some places, they more than tripled, even when increases in the number of students were factored in.
It’s something Toronto father and former school board trustee Norm Di Pasquale is very familiar with.
By the end of October, his 12-year-old son William had missed about 10 days of school. The reason?
“Bullies exist,” said William, sitting on his bed, which is covered in Squishmallows. Certificates of achievement are taped to his walls: for math, piano and a Virtue of the Month award for compassion.
“They’ll say, like, mean stuff,” William said in a quiet voice.
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘I don’t care, okay, yeah, you said it.’ But sometimes it, like, kind of hurts.”
William points out he’s small for his age at four feet six inches. This, as well as a facial twitch, are two reasons William says he gets bullied in the schoolyard.
“It’s hard to not twitch. I don’t know how.”
His father, Norm, says the bullying is both verbal and physical.
“When these kinds of incidents happen, I’m pretty well guaranteed there’s going to be an absence the next day.”
William will be resistant the next morning, Norm explains. He could be slow to get out of bed and get dressed or complain that he feels sick.
“You don’t always get a clear reason.… As a parent who has to start work, you know, at 9 a.m., you have a limited amount of runway to convince your child to go into school in the morning.”
Absences as a ‘symptom’
William is far from alone, according to David Smith, a psychologist and education professor at the University of Ottawa who studies school attendance and whose previous work has looked at bullying.
“Every day there are, like, hundreds or thousands of students who are out of school because of the bullying that they’re experiencing,” he said.
Bullying, which can now follow kids home via social media and group chats, is hard to quantify, and not something tracked in the data CBC obtained.
Because data on absences is also collected inconsistently across jurisdictions, using descriptors that are often vague and subjective, it’s difficult to get a clear picture of what’s happening, said Natasha McBrearty, who also researches school attendance at the University of Ottawa and is a registered psychotherapist.
“When we think about school attendance, we think about it as a symptom of underlying issues that can be going on,” she explained.
These could include physical or mental health concerns, lack of transportation, changing technology that makes it easier to learn from home, housing instability or even kids having to work to support their families, she says.
What the data show
CBC News reached out to 46 school districts with student populations of more than 25,000 to request data on the reasons for absences at different ages. We received at least some data from 26 districts across Canada.
CBC News requested the following data for 2018-19 to 2024-25 inclusive, but several districts had different starting years:
- Excused absences, which include religious holidays, professional appointments, school trips, snow days, family events such as funerals and often illnesses. These increased over five years in 11 out of 15 districts that tracked this. Two districts showed an increase for one age group and a decrease for another. One showed an overall decrease, and one had only one year of data.
- Unexcused absences, which occur for reasons not sanctioned by the province or school district, or absences for which there is no explanation. These increased over five years in 10 out of 15 districts, while four showed mixed results at different age levels. One had only one year of data.
- Illnesses increased over five years at all ages in 11 out of 12 districts that measured it independently. One district had only one year of data.
- Chronic absence, which generally means the proportion of students who miss more than 10 per cent of the school year, or roughly two days a month. Research has found it to be predictive of negative outcomes later in life. Previous CBC reporting, which included fewer districts, found chronic absenteeism had increased in most places as of the 2022-23 school year. This analysis shows increases over five years in eight out of 19 districts and mixed results among different age groups in six others. Four districts saw an overall improvement.
Absences due to mental health or anxiety could show up in any category. If a child is stressed because of bullying and complains of a stomach ache, it might get reported as an illness. If no one reports the absence, it would be considered unexcused.
“There’s no button for bullying in the SchoolMessenger application,” Norm explained, referring to the app he uses to report William’s absences.
‘You cannot pretend like nothing is happening’
Courtney MacLean, a mother of three in Bassano, Alta., is clear about the reason when she calls in to report an absence.
“When I call and I leave that message and I say my daughter is taking a mental health day or my daughter is struggling … it’s because if they don’t know, they’re going to treat her the same when she comes back,” she explained.
“You cannot pretend like nothing is happening.”
All three of MacLean’s children have ADHD. Her eldest, 12-year-old Evelyn, also has anxiety.
Until last summer, the family lived in Airdrie, where MacLean says her daughter’s class had 52 students and two teachers.
“She was constantly nervous to go to school. She wouldn’t raise her hand and if she needed help with something she would refuse to ask for help because it would draw the attention on her,” she explained.
MacLean knows firsthand how much harder school can be for kids who are neurodivergent, and says her children came home depleted.
“There’s so much going on, there’s so many people, so much noise, so much stimulation.”
An exclusive analysis shows a rise in students across Canada calling in sick compared to 5 years ago. For The National, CBC’s Tara Carman breaks down what the data reveals and speaks to leading experts about what could be behind the increase in school absenteeism.
“My Gavin especially, you know, he has to try really hard with his neurodivergence to rein in his enthusiasm and sit still and do all of his work and, and remember all the little things. And he would just come home at the end of the day sometimes and just throw himself down on the floor, not in anger or anything, but just completely spent.”
Things have improved for her children since moving to a smaller town with smaller class sizes, but MacLean says Evelyn continues to struggle.
The return to school after the teacher’s strike in Alberta coincided with a mental health crisis for her daughter, which MacLean says was partly triggered by anticipation of upcoming exams.
“Test taking is a big trigger for a lot of kids with anxiety. And a lot of kids don’t have [individual learning plans] to say, oh, you’re allowed to have more time or you’re allowed to have a quiet space, or you can have noise cancelling headphones.”
And while some parents may not consider mental health challenges a reason to stay home from school, neither MacLean nor Di Pasquale are taking that approach.
“He has to endure, it seems, enough while he’s at school that I don’t want him to endure further hardship from me prior to school starting,” Di Pasquale said, referring to William.
“I need that line of communication to stay open. He has to trust me.”
Helping kids feel safe
Some parents who cannot work from home may have no choice but to send them.
And teachers are generally doing the best they can under challenging conditions, MacLean says.
What would help her children is more staff in schools trained to recognize the signs of mental health distress. She would also like the school to check with all families about what makes things harder or easier for their child.
“I think you’d have a lot of kids that wanted it a little quieter, or who wanted a little more space and wanted a little less eyes on them or, you know, wanted a bit more time.”
William is clear about what would make school easier for him: More staff outside at recess and lunch to keep an eye on what’s going on in the schoolyard.
“We’re like a little short of staff this year and … usually it’s one person on the field monitoring everyone.”
Studies suggest that William is right about this, according to the University of Ottawa’s David Smith.
“There is good research, and it’s been around for a while, that has shown that when you increase adult supervision in under-supervised places in schools and schoolyards, you have a meaningful effect on bullying rates,” he said.
“It doesn’t get rid of all of it, that’s for sure, but it can make a substantial impact.”
Another thing Smith’s research has examined is the importance of strong relationships with teachers in increasing a child’s sense of safety at school.
“There’s, you know, less of a chance that they’re going to need to stay home and avoid school because … there’s somebody there that I can count on. There’s somebody that I can go to if I’m having a bad day.”
