What drives school anxiety? It's more complex than it looks.

 So recently I found myself thinking about the enormous number of reasons children have given me for why school feels overwhelming or worrying. I thought you might find it interesting to hear just how varied those reasons can be.

So sensory overload comes up quite a lot, but different kids worry about different things. Worries about crowds and loud noises are common. Other worries have been around glaring lights, having a classroom next door to smelly toilets, or the smell of chemicals from a chemistry lab.

Other reasons have been around not being able to do the work, and then feeling like a failure. A fairly common reason is for young people feeling like they don't belong and social isolation or dealing with friendship fallouts also feature.

Other reasons I've come across are not wanting to leave alone parents who are struggling with mental health issues or who have violent partners. I've also heard kids talk about a wide range of worries from the school bus crashing, to somebody attacking the school or worries about having to read aloud or speak in front of the class.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but it just gives you a glimpse of just how different school anxiety can look.

And what's really important to understand is this - I have never spoken to a young person who has struggled with just one thing. There were always multiple worries layered together, and many of these weren't obvious to parents or staff at first.

I also genuinely can't think of two children whose experiences were exactly the same.

School anxiety is very rarely caused by one single factor. It usually develops from a combination of how a child experiences the world and what's happening around them. So some factors might relate to the child themselves, some to the school environment, and some to what's happening outside of school.

And this leads us to a really important takeaway. If your child is worried about school, the very first step is finding out why. Without that understanding, it's incredibly hard to put the right support in place. What will help a child who fears an attack on their school will be completely different from what helps a child who is overwhelmed by the sensory environment.

There is no one size fits all plan for school anxiety. Children need personalised support based on their experience.

To help with this, I've created a school anxiety checklist that gently walks you through some of the different factors that might be affecting your child. You can download it here.