'Don't ask pupils questions!' Schools are told teachers must avoid triggering anxiety in children under woke council guidance

Teachers are being told to stop asking pupils questions in case it makes them anxious, in woke guidance aimed at reducing absence.Councils across the country are asking schools to make ‘adjustments’ for children with emotional issues to stop them skipping school.
Other measures to ease anxiety include setting longer deadlines for homework and giving verbal feedback rather than grades.
The interventions are to combat a surge in ‘emotionally-based school avoidance’ (EBSA) following the pandemic.
But last night education experts said the move was a ‘recipe for disaster’ and could produce a generation of children unprepared for real life.
A Daily Mail audit of guidance by local authorities found a number are asking schools to make allowances for pupils who have ‘emotional distress’ around attending school.
In one example, Gateshead Council says if a child finds participating challenging, they ‘will not be asked to answer a question in class’.
It also says troubled pupils can decide where to sit in lessons and with whom, have longer deadlines for homework and receive verbal feedback about schoolwork rather than grades.
It also recommends allowing anxious children to leave the classroom before or after the end of a lesson to ‘avoid sensory overload’ and felt pads on the bottom of chair legs to avoid scraping sounds.
Meanwhile, Essex council is recommending that pupils be allowed to skip the lessons that they find ‘a trigger’.
It suggests ‘positive praise for getting through a lesson’, instead of ‘sanctions for challenging behaviour’.
And it also says anxious children should be given a ‘time-out’ card for when feeling overwhelmed in lessons, as well as ‘lesson breaks to allow some calm down time’.
Schools in Sutton, in south London, have also been told to take a flexible approach to children with emotional-based school avoidance, such as ‘dropping certain subjects when provoking high levels of stress, being excused from reading aloud in class and reducing homework demands’.
Meanwhile guidance from Suffolk County Council cites as good practice a school that has introduced ‘a policy that teachers will not randomly pick on pupils to answer a question in class’.
It comes after teaching unions said their members had seen a rise in EBSA in their schools.
This type of absence, where children refuse to go to school because they say it makes them anxious, is regarded as different to truancy.
Teachers say many pupils missed out on vital social development during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and have struggled ever since.
However, one former headteacher told the Daily Mail said making adjustments for anxious pupils could have a potential negative impact ‘for the whole school’.
He added: ‘These demands chip away at the rules and structures that maintain order.
‘Schools can have up to 2,000 teenagers milling around each day.
‘The rules and structures are there for a reason. It risks the whole thing breaking down.’
Dennis Hayes, Emeritus Professor of education at Derby University and co-author of The Dangerous Rise in Therapeutic Education said: ‘Teachers need to reassert what their profession is about: education not therapy.’
While Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education said: ‘These guidelines are a recipe for disaster.
‘They will unwind both pupil behaviour and academic endeavour. The best antidote to pupil anxiety is challenge rather than appeasement.’
It comes as school absence rates post-pandemic continue to cause major concern.
In 2018/19, the overall absence rate was 4.7 per cent, while the persistent absence rate, when pupils miss one in ten sessions, was 10.9 per cent.
By the autumn term in 2024/25, overall absence was 6.38, while the persistent absence rate was 17.8 per cent.
Both figures are improvements on the previous year but rates of severe absence, where children miss half or more of the sessions, have got worse, increasing from 1.97 per cent to 2.04 per cent.
Schools are under pressure to take extra measures to bring rates down and to comply with equality legislation that states that ‘reasonable adjustments’ should be made for disabilities, including mental health disabilities.
The law does not define what is considered ‘reasonable'.
Some experts in the medical profession have warned that the diagnoses of mental health disorders and neurodevelopmental differences is out of control.
Dr Sami Timimi, child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author of a new book Searching for Normal, said: ‘The struggles of adolescence are a vital part of growing up; being able to just experience them, learn how to live with them and develop an understanding that things will change.
‘But once you enter into the framework of imagining these stresses and struggles as markers for potential mental disorders, you could inadvertently end up in a lifelong relationship with feeling that there’s a part of your identity that is dysfunctional or broken or dysregulated, which needs to be managed, controlled, treated or suppressed.’
The councils were contacted for comment but did not respond.
A Department for Education spokesman said: 'We encourage a supportive approach to getting children back into school and that includes making reasonable adjustments, but also applying common sense and maintaining standards, including setting high attendance expectations.
'Keeping children in school and reversing the worrying trend in school absence rates is a vital priority for the sake of children’s futures and mental health has an important role to play in this.
'Through our Plan for Change, we have made huge progress in tackling the attendance crisis, with over 5 million more days in school last academic year and 140,000 fewer pupils persistently absent – signalling the biggest year-on-year improvement in attendance in a decade.'