Beyond “School Refusal”: What Happens When a Child’s Nervous System Says Enough

Rethinking Burnout, Attendance, and the Limits of Endurance

The Child Who "Won't" Go

For some families, the shift announces itself loudly. Mornings become scenes of visible distress: crying that escalates rapidly, screaming that sounds like it is coming from somewhere deeper than defiance, bodies that go rigid or thrash in panic. There may be doors slammed, shoes kicked across the room, a child who physically cannot be moved toward the car or the gate without things escalating further. The emotional intensity can feel shocking, especially when it appears to arrive without a single identifiable trigger.

For other families, the pattern is quieter, and in some ways more confusing. A child who once chattered on the way to school becomes silent. Language thins. Eye contact drops away. They move more slowly, delay more persistently, complain of stomach aches or headaches that medical appointments cannot fully explain. Some sit motionless, unable to initiate the next step. Others negotiate for time (just five more minutes, one more cuddle, another glass of water) stretching the morning until the possibility of attendance collapses under the weight of the clock.

The outward presentation varies widely. Some children externalise distress, others internalise it. Some speak less, some speak more, but in loops of anxious rumination. Some appear agitated and oppositional. Others seem flattened and withdrawn. A number of children experience situational non-speaking in school contexts despite speaking freely at home, with communication becoming context-dependent when anxiety and overload rise. Despite these differences in expression, the underlying process often shares common features. What appears on the surface as refusal may, in many cases, reflect something closer to a nervous system that has run out of runway.

Another complicating factor is that these patterns are rarely static. A child may struggle intensely for weeks or months and then, without obvious external change, appear to be coping again. There may be days of smooth attendance interspersed with days of collapse, entire half-terms that seem settled followed by sudden regression. This variability can be profoundly disorienting for parents and professionals alike, inviting interpretations about inconsistency, manipulation, or reinforcement cycles. If a child is capable on Tuesday, why not on Wednesday?

Part of what makes this so confusing is that capacity itself is not fixed. For neurodivergent children in particular, it fluctuates in response to cumulative demand, sensory load, social complexity, sleep, health, and emotional safety. The early stages of erosion are rarely dramatic enough to trigger alarm. Instead, they are experienced as increased fragility (a narrowing of tolerance, a shortening of fuse, a thinning of language) that parents often register before anyone else does. It is frequently at home that the shift first becomes visible. The after-school unravelling intensifies. Exhaustion lingers in a way that sleep does not repair. Ordinary demands (choosing clothes, brushing teeth, packing a bag) begin to feel disproportionately difficult. The child's world starts to contract rather than expand, even while attendance and attainment remain outwardly intact.

By the time attendance visibly falters, the erosion has often been underway for some time.

The Problem with the Phrase "School Refusal"

Language shapes more than description. It shapes response. The words used to categorise a child's difficulty rarely remain confined to documentation. They influence how adults interpret behaviour, where responsibility is understood to sit, and which interventions feel justified.

The phrase "school refusal" carries particular weight even when used carefully. Refusal implies a position taken in relation to something available. It suggests that attendance sits within reach and that the child has, for reasons yet to be understood, decided not to participate. The logical task that follows is therefore to understand and modify that decision. Support becomes oriented toward changing behaviour: reducing anxiety, breaking avoidance cycles, increasing confidence, restoring routine. For some children, in some circumstances, elements of that framing may be accurate. There are situations in which anxiety becomes anticipatory and self-reinforcing, and graduated exposure is genuinely helpful. But the difficulty arises when the term is applied broadly to situations in which capacity is not intact.

If a child is already functioning at the edge of what their nervous system can sustain, what presents as refusal may not be an act of defiance or even avoidance in the conventional sense. It may instead be the outward expression of accumulated strain, a physiological signal that what is being asked has become unsustainable. When nervous systems are persistently overextended through sensory input, cognitive switching, social interpretation, and the enormous effort of masking, protective responses become more likely. Those responses do not always look like fear in its recognisable form. They may look like rage, inertia, shutdown, somatic complaint, or flat detachment.

The terminology we choose determines whether those responses are interpreted as behavioural problems to be corrected, or physiological signals to be understood.

"Emotionally based school avoidance" is gentler in tone, and the shift away from "refusal" is meaningful. But it still locates the difficulty within the child's emotional world rather than in the interaction between child and environment. The structural features of the school day (its pace, its transitions, its sensory demands, its requirement for near-constant social performance) remain largely unquestioned. The focus stays on how to support the child's internal state sufficiently to restore their presence, rather than on what their presence has actually been costing them.

A child can want to attend school and still be unable to sustain what it demands. Desire and incapacity are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the coexistence of the two is often what renders these situations so painful. Many children speak warmly about friendships, favourite subjects, or specific teachers while simultaneously finding themselves unable to tolerate the totality of the school day. If we remain within the vocabulary of refusal, that complexity is easily flattened. If we widen the lens to consider capacity, physiology, and environmental fit, a different set of questions becomes possible: not how do we overcome this child's resistance, but what has attending required of them, and has that requirement become unsustainable?

The distinction is subtle in wording, but significant in consequence.

What Burnout Actually Is, and What It Is Not

In 2024, Dr Georgie Siggers and Becky Day from Starjumpz published findings that gave clinical weight to what many families and practitioners had long understood.1 Their retrospective audit examined the case notes of 20 autistic children, aged 8 to 17, all of whom had been unable to attend school for at least three months. They were looking for a pattern, specifically, whether the presentation of these children aligned with what is understood about autistic burnout.

Every single child in the cohort showed the same cluster of symptoms: chronic exhaustion, loss of previously acquired skills and interests, heightened sensory needs, social withdrawal, mood dysregulation, and physical complaints. Every one. The uniformity led the researchers to conclude that this strongly indicates a shared underlying issue, and they called explicitly for a shift away from what they described as a potentially punitive approach toward one that is compassionate and accommodative, and for an urgent re-evaluation of current educational practices and support systems for autistic children. This is published research in BJPsych Open, the journal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. It is not advocacy literature. It is clinical findings saying directly that the children we have been categorising as refusing school are, in significant numbers, experiencing autistic burnout, and that the system's response to that does not match the nature of the problem.

So what is autistic burnout, and why does it matter that we name it accurately?

The term did not originate in clinical settings. It emerged from autistic communities, from adults describing a recurring pattern of profound exhaustion and reduced functioning that did not sit comfortably within existing labels. Researcher Dora Raymaker and colleagues describe it as a state of pervasive exhaustion, loss of function, increase in autistic traits, and withdrawal from life that results from continuously expending more resources than one has coping with activities and environments ill-suited to one's abilities and needs.2 Several things in that definition are worth staying with. Burnout is pervasive, affecting multiple areas of life simultaneously, not just school attendance. It involves genuine loss of function. And crucially, it results from a sustained mismatch between demand and available resource, not from a deficit in the individual, but from the relationship between the individual and their environment.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists describes autistic burnout as a state of exhaustion associated with functional and cognitive deterioration and an increase in autism symptomatology, as a consequence of coping with social interaction (including masking) and the sensory environment.3 Importantly, the RCPsych notes that it overlaps symptomatically with anxiety and depression, and that there may be a heightened risk of suicide. This is not a mild difficulty or a phase to be managed. When families describe how much their child has changed (the skills that have become inaccessible, the personality that feels unreachable, the complete disappearance of the young person they knew) this is the clinical picture they are describing.

Autistic educator Helen Edgar, drawing on the AASPIRE burnout research, describes two distinct types.4 The first is everyday social and sensory burnout, the kind that can build across a single school day, sometimes described as the "coke bottle" effect, in which pressure accumulates steadily until it releases at the first available safe moment, typically at home. The second is severe autistic burnout: what Kieran Rose describes as a crash where you keep on crashing, in which a child may find it increasingly difficult to continue their usual daily routines including school. This is the acute presentation that Siggers and Day documented, the child who, by the time non-attendance becomes visible, has been accumulating strain for far longer than the attendance record reflects.

The cumulative dimension is central to understanding all of this. Burnout does not follow a single difficult event. It develops when the energy required to cope with daily expectations consistently outpaces the energy available for recovery. Helen Edgar uses the image of a bucket: autistic children often wake up with their bucket already partially full, because the world is calibrated for neurotypes that aren't theirs.5 Sensory input, cognitive switching, social demands, and the effort of masking all add to the level throughout the day. When the bucket overflows, what becomes visible is a meltdown or shutdown, not behavioural choices, but the nervous system's way of communicating that it has all got too much to manage. And if recovery is incomplete between days, if the bucket never fully empties before it starts filling again, the baseline shifts. What once felt manageable begins to require strain. What once required strain begins to feel impossible.

What is broadly agreed across the research is that burnout represents more than temporary stress. It is not reluctance, and it cannot be reduced to anxiety alone, although it frequently coexists with both. It reflects the consequences of being required, over time, to do more than one's nervous system can sustainably manage. Understanding it this way shifts the interpretive lens entirely. When attendance falters, it may not be the origin of the problem but the most visible point at which capacity has finally been exceeded. The question becomes less about motivation and more about sustainability, less about restoring routine at any cost, and more about understanding what that routine has required.

Why School Carries This Particular Cost

To understand why burnout so often becomes visible through school attendance, it is necessary to look honestly at what mainstream schooling actually requires of a neurodivergent nervous system, and to resist the temptation to treat the school environment as a neutral backdrop against which the child's difficulties play out.

Mainstream schools are built around rapid transitions, divided attention, sustained social interpretation, and behavioural conformity. In a single school day, a child may move between six or seven subjects and teachers, shift repeatedly between structured and unstructured time, navigate noise levels that vary dramatically, manage proximity to a large number of other people, and be expected to initiate, sustain, and complete tasks within externally imposed timeframes, all while appearing regulated and compliant. This architecture is not inherently cruel. It is designed for a particular kind of nervous system. The problem is that it assumes a kind of flexible, broadly distributed attention and social bandwidth that many neurodivergent children do not have in the way that the system requires.

For many autistic children, attention operates monotropically, a concept developed by autistic researchers Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser, and Wenn Lawson, and described by Fergus Murray as a pull: when attention flows, it flows deeply into fewer channels rather than spreading broadly across many.6 Helen Edgar writes that when a monotropic person is immersed in something meaningful, this depth can be energising and productive, it can be a genuine flow state.7 The difficulty arises when that deep attentional engagement is repeatedly interrupted and redirected. Being asked to exit a deep attentional state, reset, and become fully present elsewhere (again and again across a six-hour day) is not a neutral experience. Each forced transition carries a cost. Multiplied across a full school week, layered with sensory demands and social complexity, that cost accumulates into something significant. What may look externally like inattention or disengagement can, in many cases, reflect the strain of navigating an environment that prioritises breadth and speed over depth and continuity.

Alongside attentional cost sits masking. Helen Edgar describes this as a child effectively trying to put a lid on their cup, suppressing their regulatory behaviours, mirroring neurotypical social responses, and keeping their autistic self contained in order to meet normative expectations.8 For many children, masking is not a deliberate strategy. It is something learned, often without conscious awareness, as a survival adaptation to environments that do not accommodate the way they actually function. Schools frequently reward it, because the child appears settled, well-behaved, or high-achieving. But masking is never energetically free. There is only so long it is manageable without a break, and sustained masking has been identified consistently within burnout research as one of the primary factors contributing to exhaustion and reduced functioning over time.

What makes the cost of masking particularly difficult to identify is precisely that it keeps a child performing "fine" in school long after the internal expenditure has become unsustainable. Schools often say they don't see a problem. This is not usually disingenuous. The child has become skilled at containing their distress within that specific context. What gets described as "seeming fine at school" is not evidence of genuine okayness. It is evidence of an enormous, ongoing expenditure that does not show up in classroom observations. The collapse that happens at home (the meltdown, the shutdown, the dysregulation that seems completely out of proportion to its apparent trigger) is not a separate problem from school. It is the direct consequence of school. When children return home and are back in a safe environment with people they trust, they often feel the relief of finally being able to release the built-up pressure from a day of masking and sensory and social overload. Helen Edgar is clear on this: sensory and social overload expressed as meltdowns or shutdowns is the mind and body's way of saying it has all got too much to manage alone.9

Understanding this dynamic changes the question. Instead of asking what is happening at home that is causing such distress, the more accurate question is: what has the school day required of this child that home is now receiving the cost of?

There is also a concept that Helen Edgar names as the risk of "just one more", the way that parents, schools, and professionals, all trying to help, can unknowingly push a child over the edge by adding one more small demand to a system that is already at or near capacity.10 One more morning. One more activity. One more homework task. One more social obligation. Each individual addition can seem entirely reasonable in isolation. Cumulatively, they prevent the bucket from ever emptying. Edgar is direct about this: if your child is already heading toward burnout and you keep pushing for just one more, they will eventually reach a point where they can no longer keep trying at all. Knowing that a child is already close to their limit is not a reason to push harder to build resilience. It is a reason to stop adding.

The Signs Before Absence Begins

Burnout rarely announces itself through sudden non-attendance. More often it develops gradually through sustained overextension, and the earliest signs can look like nothing more than an ordinary difficult patch, which is precisely why they are so frequently missed, or noted with concern but not acted upon, until the point of collapse.

Attendance may remain intact. Academic performance may appear unchanged. A child may continue to speak positively about particular aspects of school, especially where strong interests or familiar relationships are involved. What shifts first is not always participation, but regulation.

Energy may stop replenishing as reliably between school days. Recovery becomes incomplete, with strain accumulating across the week rather than lifting overnight. Tasks that were previously managed with relative ease begin to require more visible effort. Transitions become increasingly destabilising. Executive functioning (planning, initiating, switching attention) starts to feel less reliable. Language may narrow under pressure, not as deliberate withdrawal but as a reflection of reduced available resource; children who once talked freely about their day begin responding in monosyllables or not at all.

At home, the margins of the day shift noticeably. After-school periods may become more intensely dysregulated, or conversely more completely shut down. Fatigue lingers despite adequate sleep. Physical symptoms begin to appear with increasing frequency: headaches and stomach aches on school mornings, nausea, exhaustion that rest does not seem to repair. Changes to sleep and eating patterns may emerge. Interests that usually provide regulation may be leaned on more heavily, or (where depletion is further advanced) may seem to fade, which is often one of the more alarming signs for the families who witness it.

The contrast between a child on a school day and the same child during a holiday or at a weekend can become increasingly stark. Parents often find themselves noticing, with a mix of relief and dread, that their child seems like a different person away from school, calmer, more communicative, more present, more themselves. This contrast is itself important information. It reflects the difference between an environment that fits and one that does not.

None of these features, taken individually, are unusual in childhood. Children have difficult patches. The distinction lies in trajectory, in whether fragility is accumulating rather than resolving, whether recovery is becoming progressively less complete, whether ordinary demands are beginning to require disproportionate effort over time. The direction of travel matters far more than any individual moment. And parents are almost always the first to notice the trajectory shifting. They are also, too often, the last to be believed.

When Pressure Increases as Capacity Decreases

When attendance becomes unstable, the institutional response typically follows a familiar pattern. Meetings are arranged, plans are drawn up, and conversations centre on restoration and reintegration. Attendance percentages are discussed alongside long-term educational outcomes. There is understandable concern about patterns becoming embedded, about missed learning and social opportunity, about the narrowing of a child's world. Within this context, a sense of urgency can take hold. Early intervention is widely regarded as protective, and delayed action is frequently framed as risk.

The difficulty arises when the strategies employed to restore attendance rest on the assumption that capacity remains fundamentally intact, when a child who is depleted is responded to as though they are avoiding.

If attendance difficulty is conceptualised primarily as avoidance, the emphasis naturally falls on graded exposure, reassurance, reinforcement, and the re-establishment of routine. The child is encouraged to take small steps back into school, supported to challenge anxious thoughts, reassured that feared outcomes are unlikely to materialise. In some circumstances, these approaches are appropriate and proportionate. But the complexity emerges when the underlying difficulty is not solely anticipatory anxiety, but cumulative depletion. Burnout is characterised not simply by fear of attendance, but by reduced available resource across multiple domains simultaneously. Executive functioning may already be compromised. Sensory tolerance may have narrowed significantly. Social navigation may feel effortful to the point of exhaustion. Masking may no longer be sustainable. In this context, the issue is less about overcoming avoidance and more about whether the system being re-entered is currently tolerable at all.

Ross Greene's often-cited principle (children do well if they can) is directly relevant here.11 It asks us to start from the assumption that a child who is not managing is not choosing not to manage, but is limited by lagging skills or overwhelming circumstances. Applied to burnout, this means reading non-attendance not as a decision that needs to be reversed, but as communication that something has exceeded capacity. When a nervous system is operating close to its threshold, additional demand does not register as neutral encouragement. Even well-intentioned insistence can be experienced as intensification. What is framed externally as support may be processed internally as pressure.

This helps to explain why some attendance plans appear, at least initially, to exacerbate rather than alleviate distress. A child who had been fragile but still attending may move into complete non-attendance once expectations are formalised. Somatic symptoms may increase, shutdowns may lengthen, presentation may become more extreme or less predictable. From the outside, it can seem as though avoidance has deepened. From the inside, it may reflect a system that has been asked to stretch beyond what remains available, and that has, in the formalisation of expectations, lost the last remaining sense that any of this is within its control. For many autistic children, a sense of agency over their own participation is not a preference. It is a regulatory necessity. When it is removed, even subtly and even by well-meaning adults, the experience of the environment can shift from difficult to intolerable.

None of this renders structure harmful or expectations unnecessary. Predictability can be deeply regulating, and many autistic children actively need rhythm and shape to feel safe. The question is not whether expectations should exist, but whether the expectations currently in place align with this child's present capacity, rather than with an attendance target or a timetable designed before their needs were understood. Pressure applied at the point of exhaustion does not rebuild margin. It narrows what little remains.

Fluctuation Is Not Failure

One of the most destabilising features of this picture (for families, and for the professionals trying to support them) is its inconsistency. A child may attend enthusiastically for a period and then become unable to do so. They may speak warmly about school while simultaneously showing signs of depletion. Apparent improvements may sit alongside renewed fragility. From the outside, this variation can look deeply contradictory.

Within a framework that privileges stability and predictability, fluctuation is easily interpreted as inconsistency of will, as evidence that the child could manage if they chose to. Yet when capacity is understood as dynamic rather than fixed, variation becomes less anomalous. Nervous systems respond to cumulative input, sleep, health, relational safety, and environmental fit. The same set of demands may be tolerable at one point in time and genuinely unsustainable at another. A child may genuinely wish to attend school and yet lack the regulatory margin to do so consistently. They may experience periods of relative expansion followed by contraction. Neither state invalidates the other. Both can coexist within the same developmental picture.

This variability complicates interpretation. Patterns do not always resolve neatly into anxiety that benefits from exposure or depletion that requires recalibration. At times, elements of both are present simultaneously. The task becomes less about identifying a single explanatory label and more about observing sustainability across time. Seen in this light, progress is not best measured by immediate restoration of attendance or by the absence of visible distress. It is measured by whether capacity stabilises or continues to erode, whether participation is becoming more sustainable, or increasingly effortful to maintain.

Fluctuation, then, is not evidence of manipulation or failure. It is information about where the threshold currently sits.

Recovery and What It Actually Requires

Recovery from autistic burnout is possible. The research does not describe it as permanent, and families should hold that. But recovery cannot begin while the demands that caused it remain intact, and it cannot be understood as a straightforward reinstatement of what came before.

The AASPIRE burnout research, summarised in Helen Edgar's family guide, identifies the following as key to recovery: time off from school or significant reduction in demands, reduced self-expectations, time with special interests, time stimming, sensory and social withdrawal, and the passage of time.12 These are not luxuries or rewards for poor attendance. They are the physiological preconditions for rebuilding capacity. When a nervous system has been operating beyond sustainable limits, margin does not reappear on command. It re-emerges gradually, often unevenly, and typically only once the sense of threat has meaningfully reduced.

During this period, engagement with special interests is not a distraction from recovery. For children whose attention is naturally monotropic, deep immersion in areas of genuine interest is one of the primary ways in which the nervous system regulates and restores. The gaming, the creative obsessions, the hours re-reading a favourite series, these are not problems to be managed around. They are often the most significant recovery work happening. Interest-led engagement can provide regulation, coherence, and a sense of competence at a time when broader demands feel destabilising. Helen Edgar is clear on this: low demand does not mean no structure or no expectations. It means prioritising and accommodating needs, and trusting that recovery requires conditions rather than pressure.13

Recovery is also rarely linear. Capacity may expand for several days and then contract suddenly. A child who manages an activity on Monday may need the rest of the week to recover from it. What looks from the outside like inconsistency or regression may reflect the uneven, gradual process by which systems that have been under sustained overextension begin to find a new equilibrium. These fluctuations are not failure. They are the recovery process doing what it needs to do.

Importantly, recovery does not require abandoning aspiration. Many children who experience burnout continue to value learning, friendships, and their futures. What tends to shift is the pace and structure through which those aspirations are pursued, sustainability replacing intensity as the guiding principle. In practical terms, this may involve flexible timetabling, adapted environments, reductions in academic load, or alternative provision. In some cases it may require formal recognition that the current setting is not the right fit at this point in time. These decisions carry emotional weight, and they are rarely straightforward. But when framed around sustainability rather than compliance, they become easier to examine honestly, and the law, which we come to below, provides a framework for doing so.

What the Law Says, and Where to Go From Here

Understanding burnout as the underlying cause of a child's inability to access school changes the picture for families trying to navigate the SEND legal framework. It matters that families know there are specific duties and rights that apply here, whether or not their child currently has an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP.)

If your child does not yet have an EHCP

Many children experiencing burnout do not yet have an EHCP, and if your child is struggling to access school, you should absolutely consider requesting an EHC needs assessment. The local authority has a legal duty to conduct an assessment where it appears that the child may have special educational needs and may need special educational provision to be made through an EHCP. Burnout, particularly where there is a diagnosis of autism or other neurodevelopmental conditions, and where there is documented impact on functioning and wellbeing, is directly relevant to this threshold.

Whether or not you have an EHCP (or are in the process of requesting one), Section 19 of the Education Act 1996 places a separate duty on local authorities. This duty requires the local authority to arrange suitable full-time education for children of compulsory school age who, by reason of illness or otherwise, would not receive suitable education without such arrangements being made. The word "suitable" has legal significance here. Education must be suitable to the child's age, ability, aptitude, and any special educational needs they may have. Crucially, it must also be accessible in practice. Provision that is offered in a setting the child cannot currently access is not suitable. This duty is not contingent on a child being permanently unable to attend any educational setting. It applies where, at this point in time, they cannot receive suitable education without alternative arrangements.

Canary SEND offers a free toolkit to guide you through requesting an EHC needs assessment, as well as a free toolkit for actioning the local authority's Section 19 duty to ensure your child has access to suitable education. These are practical, legally grounded resources designed to help you understand your rights and take effective action.

If your child has an EHCP

Where a child already has an EHCP, the Section 19 duty still applies if the child is not receiving suitable education. But there is an additional legal duty under Section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014, which requires the local authority to secure the special educational provision specified in the child's plan. If your child's current placement is not meeting the needs set out in their EHCP, or if the environment is actively contributing to deterioration in their health and wellbeing, that is directly relevant to what the plan should say and what provision should be specified. The legal framework does not require a child to continue enduring an unsuitable environment while paperwork catches up. It requires local authorities to arrange provision that is appropriate to the child's needs right now.

Many families find themselves in a position where school is acknowledging absence, professionals are recommending reintegration plans, and their child is showing every sign that their nervous system is in crisis. The legal framework, used well, says something different from what families are often told. It says that the child is entitled to education that is suitable to their needs, and that "suitable" is a word with meaning, not a synonym for "back in the building as soon as possible."

Next steps

There is a great deal more to be said about the practical and legal routes available to families in this position, about how to evidence burnout within the SEND system, how to use Section 19 effectively, how to challenge reintegration plans that are not grounded in a child's actual capacity, and what alternatives to mainstream school can look like. Canary SEND's website includes comprehensive guides on EOTAS (Education Otherwise Than At School), EHC needs assessments, alternative provision, and how to build a legally robust case for suitable education.

If you are navigating this and feel uncertain about your next steps, reach out to support networks. Most towns have local parent carer forums. National charities like IPSEA (and SOS!SEN offer expert guidance on SEND law. Where necessary, consider seeking further input. I offer free initial 15-minute enquiry calls to help map out next steps and advise you on your rights, and I work with families to build strategic, legally informed approaches that centre child dignity and environmental adaptation rather than individual capacity-building.

The aim of this piece has been to lay the groundwork: to name what is actually happening, to root it in the research that supports that naming, and to make clear that these children are not refusing. They are signalling. And the system's task (and ours) is to listen.

References

Further Reading and Resources:

Helen Edgar, Autistic Realms – Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide
www.autisticrealms.com

Spectrum Gaming – Barriers to Education: What is Burnout?
www.barrierstoeducation.co.uk

Not Fine In School
www.notfineinschool.co.uk

IPSEA (Independent Provider of Special Education Advice)
www.ipsea.org.uk

SOS!SEN
www.sossen.org.uk

Canary SEND – For guidance on EHCPs, Section 19, EOTAS, alternative provision, and free toolkits
www.canarysend.co.uk

Footnotes:

1.     Siggers, G. & Day, B. (2024). Beyond School Avoidance: Recognising, Identifying, and Addressing Autistic Burnout in Children. BJPsych Open, 10(6), e190. doi: 10.1192/bjo.2024.433 ↩

2.     Raymaker, D., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Santos, A. D., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). "Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew": Defining Autistic Burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079 ↩

3.     Royal College of Psychiatrists (2020). The psychiatric management of autism in adults (CR228). Royal College of Psychiatrists: London. ↩

4.     Edgar, H. (2023). Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide. Autistic Realms. Available at: www.autisticrealms.com (p. 13: "Descriptions and types of Autistic Burnout") ↩

5.     Edgar, H. (2023). Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide. Autistic Realms. Available at: www.autisticrealms.com (p. 18: "Buckets and Burnout") ↩

6.     Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398; Murray, F. (2018). Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism. The Psychologist. British Psychological Society. Available at: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/me-and-monotropism-unified-theory-autism ↩

7.     Edgar, H. (2023). Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide. Autistic Realms. Available at: www.autisticrealms.com (p. 47: "Monotropism") ↩

8.     Edgar, H. (2023). Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide. Autistic Realms. Available at: www.autisticrealms.com (p. 89: "They seem fine in school – Autistic Masking") ↩

9.     Edgar, H. (2023). Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide. Autistic Realms. Available at: www.autisticrealms.com (p. 36: "Meltdowns, Shutdowns & Sensory Overload") ↩

10.  Edgar, H. (2023). Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide. Autistic Realms. Available at: www.autisticrealms.com (p. 84: "Risk of 'Just One More'") ↩

11.  Greene, R. W. (2010). The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children. Harper Paperbacks; cited in Edgar, H. (2023). Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide. Autistic Realms. Available at: www.autisticrealms.com (p. 52: "Ideas for Home – Low Demand Parenting Approaches") ↩

12.  Edgar, H. (2023). Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide. Autistic Realms. Available at: www.autisticrealms.com (p. 99: "Supporting your child or young person through Autistic Burnout: Recovery and Healing"), citing Raymaker, D.M., Nicolaidis, C., & AASPIRE Team (2019). "My physical body and mind started shutting down": Autistic burnout and the costs of coping and passing. International Society for Autism Research, Montreal, CA. ↩

13.  Edgar, H. (2023). Autistic Burnout: A Family Guide. Autistic Realms. Available at: www.autisticrealms.com (p. 52: "Ideas for Home – Low Demand Parenting Approaches") ↩