School anxiety: What if it's not just one thing?

 When we think about school anxiety, we're often looking for something specific that's making school hard, Perhaps a friendship difficulty or difficulty with a particular lesson.

But what if it's not just one thing? What if lots of smaller things were just building up over time?  

Some interesting research published in 2025 looked at autistic youngsters' experiences of school and the researchers found that autistic young people often experience school as stressful and exhausting. The students describe difficulties with things like sensory overload, difficult interactions with peers and with teachers and feeling like they just didn't belong.

One of the most interesting things about this study was it talked about how stress accumulated over time. So the young people described themselves as constantly having to fit in a school environment that didn't adequately meet their needs, where they faced lots of challenges with limited support and not enough opportunities to recover. This took just an enormous amount of effort and contributed to negative emotions like anxiety, panic, anger, and exhaustion.

And the stress just didn't affect how they felt about school, it also made it very difficult for them to learn at school and impacted their attendance.

So what can we take from this research? Well, I think there's potentially three messages.

The first is don't just look for big problems. Sometimes it's lots of small things that taken together can make school feel very difficult. Individually, they might not seem particularly significant, but stick them all together and they can become overwhelming.

Secondly, pay attention to patterns over time. Is your child becoming increasingly exhausted as the week goes on? Are they struggling more with things that they managed previously? Do they need longer to recover from school? These might be signs that stress is building up.

And third, don't wait until attendance becomes a problem until you start to take action. Even if your child's attending school every day, it's worth exploring what they're finding tricky and working with school to see what could be changed. Because the aim shouldn't be to help children keep pushing through difficult situations, we want to reduce the things that are causing stress in the first place so that school feels more manageable. And that's why understanding what's behind school anxiety is so important.

If you're not sure what's making school difficult for your young person, you can download my free school anxiety checklist here. It will help you start to explore what might be going on.

Research: Sasso I (2025) “I wanted to learn something. I just couldn't”—Autistic students‘ perspectives on emotions as drivers of absenteeism and attendance. Front. Educ. 10:1716619. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1716619