Attendance is easy to count, which is why plans get built around it. A plan that only presses for attendance leaves the frightening thing exactly where it was, so whatever compliance you win tends to collapse within a fortnight. Spend the first while finding out what the fear is made of: a person, a subject, a corridor, a test, or simply being away from home.

A new school, a timetable that split them from their friends, someone who made the corridor unsafe, an exam, a long illness, a death at home, a separation. Each of those either takes away something that made the place feel safe or adds something that makes it feel dangerous. Once you know which, you know what the plan has to reach eventually, and what it can leave well alone.

A technique that sounds right is not the same as one aimed at whatever is holding the problem in place. Ask what the hours at home actually contain, who is there, what is gained and what is escaped. The answers point at the plan, and they save months spent doing something perfectly reasonable to the wrong target.

Anxiety work goes nowhere against this, because there is little anxiety left to work on. What changes it is the shape of the day, with the good things sitting after the effort rather than instead of it, so home stops being the more comfortable option by a mile. Do it calmly and with the young person in the conversation, because done as punishment it just becomes a different fight.

In the moment it is happening, a parent is not weighing up what gets learned over a term. They are trying to end the distress in front of them, and letting the child stay home does that immediately, for everyone. Time spent making sure the adults really understand why that relief costs so much is not preamble, it is the part that holds when the morning gets loud.

Explain the pattern rather than the pupil: the relief that follows getting out of something, and the way that relief quietly books the next absence. Staff who understand it stop reading a pale, silent child as rude, and they become the people delivering most of the help, since nearly all of it happens in the building rather than in a clinic. Twenty minutes at a staff meeting is well spent.

With an older teenager this goes better as a conversation about arrangements than about character: the wifi and the console sit behind the school day, and afterwards they are theirs. Say what is changing, say when it starts, and hold it evenly whether the day went well or badly. Expect a rough fortnight, and expect it to be shorter if you have not delivered any of it as a punishment.

Ask what they think would help, what they would want in return, and what feels unfair about the current version. You are not handing over the goal, which stays as attendance, only the details, and the details are what makes a teenager keep to it in a bad week. Write the agreement down, put both names on it, and revisit it rather than rewriting it after every row.