ALISON WATSON-BURGE, RACEMEADOW PRIMARY ACADEMY, UK
Abstract
Improving attendance is rightly a priority, yet physical presence should not be treated as evidence of meaningful access to learning. For students with complex social, emotional and relational needs, being on site, remaining regulated, participating and learning independently are related but distinct achievements. This perspective article argues that schools need more precise language when judging readiness and provision. Drawing on attachment-informed and trauma-informed practice, it considers how PACE (playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, empathy) can create the relational safety upon which educational access may depend. It also argues that early relational success should not be misread as readiness for greater academic demand. Trauma-informed practice may be necessary for access to learning, but it is not in itself evidence that such access is secure, sustainable or independent.
The illusion of presence
On any given morning, staff support students who cannot yet transition independently into class, who rely on a familiar adult to cross the threshold or who can tolerate only a reduced timetable without becoming overwhelmed. Their attendance is recorded. They are on site. Yet physical presence does not necessarily amount to meaningful access to instruction, peer interaction or sustained cognitive engagement. A student may be present while remaining hypervigilant, avoidant or dependent on co-regulation. Equally, a student may participate briefly in a familiar or heavily scaffolded activity without being able to tolerate wider demands, uncertainty or independent effort. In such cases, attendance has been achieved and participation may even be visible, without it being accurate to conclude that learning is secure.
While increasing attendance is a laudable aim, it is not, on its own, a sufficient account of educational access. If schools are serious about inclusion, then they must attend not only to whether a student is physically present but also to whether that student can meaningfully engage with what school asks of them. For some students, particularly those with complex social, emotional and relational needs, full-time attendance does not make learning possible, sustainable or safe. Being in school, remaining regulated, participating in a task and learning from it are connected achievements, but they are not interchangeable. Yet schools often make decisions about provision, timetables and readiness on the basis of visible improvement, when that improvement may still be fragile, highly scaffolded and dependent on adult support.
Schools often speak as though attendance, presence, participation and learning are functionally equivalent. They are not. A student may be in school without feeling safe enough to settle; settled enough to remain in class; able to remain in class without being able to participate meaningfully; or able to participate in a narrow, adult-held task without being able to sustain the attention and flexibility that learning requires. These are not minor distinctions. They shape professional judgement about whether a student is merely enduring school, cautiously accessing it or genuinely beginning to learn within it.
Relational safety
A trauma-informed pedagogical stance (Golding et al., 2021) helps to explain why these distinctions matter. Access to learning is shaped not only by curriculum content and instructional quality, but also by whether a student experiences school as sufficiently safe, predictable and relationally manageable (Jerrim, 2025). For students whose responses to school are shaped by anxiety, threat or chronic dysregulation, educational access cannot be based on whether they are seated in the classroom, but rather should be based on an underlying sense of school belonging (Korpershoek et al., 2020). Before sustained learning is possible, many must first borrow regulation from trusted adults, learn that routines can be anticipated without fear and come to experience school as something other than a site of overwhelm. Trauma-informed practice is therefore not a soft alternative to learning, but the groundwork on which learning later depends.
Attachment-informed approaches deepen this account. A student who does not yet feel safe in relationships may struggle to tolerate proximity, correction, frustration, uncertainty or the ordinary demands of classroom life. Behaviour that appears oppositional, avoidant or defiant may therefore be better understood as protective. This requires accurate interpretation, and not low expectations or abandoned boundaries. PACE, with its emphasis on playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy (Golding and Hughes, 2012), offers one way of responding to protectiveness without escalating it.
- Playfulness: Use a light, non-adversarial tone that signals safety to a hypervigilant nervous system. In practice, this might look like using a gentle, rhythmic voice to redirect a student during a difficult transition, rather than relying on a rigid countdown that could trigger a defensive response.
- Acceptance: Validate the student’s inner emotional state while holding boundaries around behaviour. This can be demonstrated by naming the difficulty before placing a demand, stating, ‘I can see that moving to the carpet feels really overwhelming right now’, which removes the likelihood of distress being displayed through behaviour.
- Curiosity: Replace demand with genuine, non-judgemental inquiry. Instead of asking a protective or avoidant student ‘Why aren’t you working?’, an adult might wonder aloud, ‘I wonder whether the noise outside is making it hard to concentrate today?’, inviting reflection without interrogation.
- Empathy: The adult sits alongside the student, sharing the regulatory burden. For a student who has shut down, empathy in action might simply be an adult offering a quiet, non-demanding physical presence by their side.
Rather than meeting distress primarily with greater pressure, this approach seeks to reduce perceived threat, preserve connection and support co-regulation. Used well, it can help a student to remain in relationships with adults, recover more quickly from dysregulation and begin to experience school as a place in which they are understood rather than merely managed.
A student who enters the building with less distress, accepts support from a trusted adult, remains in class for longer or recovers more quickly after becoming overwhelmed has made meaningful progress. Yet schools must think carefully here. Relational improvement should not automatically be read as evidence of educational readiness. The student may appear calmer because demands have been reduced, because the environment has become more containing or because an adult is carrying much of the regulatory burden. They may participate in a familiar interaction or complete a task that has been broken down for them, without yet being able to initiate, persist, think flexibly or retain new learning with increasing independence. Trauma-informed practice may therefore be necessary for educational access, but it is not, in itself, proof that wider academic demand is yet manageable or sustainable.
Progress of this kind may still be highly contingent on adult co-regulation, environmental adjustment and careful reduction of demand. If schools collapse these distinctions, then they risk mistaking calmness for readiness. Demands are increased before the student has developed the emotional stamina, attentional control or tolerance of uncertainty needed to meet them. What looked like progress then becomes the basis for renewed overwhelm.
A more useful question, then, is not simply whether a student is attending – or even whether they appear calmer – but whether access to learning is becoming more secure and sustainable over time. Is the student able to recover from dysregulation with gradually less adult support? Can they tolerate ordinary classroom demands such as waiting, minor frustration, redirection or correction? Can they participate in tasks that are not wholly self-selected or relationally buffered? Can they sustain attention beyond a brief adult-held window and can they return to a task after disruption? Can they begin work with less prompting, accept not knowing immediately what to do and remain engaged long enough for new learning to occur? These questions speak more meaningfully to readiness than attendance figures alone, because they ask whether the student is becoming less dependent on external regulation and more able to manage the demands that learning makes.
A more precise language is needed. Educational access can be assessed through a four-part framework:
- Attendance: The student is on site
- Presence: The student is in the classroom/learning space, sufficiently physically and psychologically available not to withdraw
- Participation: The student exhibits observable engagement, often reliant on adult prompting, adaptation or relational holding
- Learning: The student possesses sufficient emotional safety and cognitive availability to acquire, retain and apply new understanding with increasing independence.
These categories may at times overlap, but they should not be conflated. A student may achieve one without fully achieving the next. If schools fail to name that clearly, then they risk building provision around optimistic misreadings of what students can currently sustain.
Picture the student who has, on paper, succeeded. After dysregulation, they remain in class, sit through input and appear calm. The task is in front of them. To an observer passing through, this may look like a success story: the student is present, regulated and compliant. Yet calm can obscure the reality of depletion. They may be exhausted, with little capacity left for task initiation or independent effort. They may not know how to begin or may be unable to tolerate the risk of getting it wrong, and so they wait instead for adult support to bridge the gap. An adult comes over, reads the question, narrows the options, offers the first step and sustains the interaction. The student then appears to participate. But the participation is heavily carried by someone else. Calmness, compliance and visible engagement should not automatically be interpreted as secure access to learning. A student may have endured the environment without yet being ready to meet its intellectual demands independently.
Scaffolding versus rescuing
The difficulty is not scaffolding itself, which remains essential. The issue is whether support enables learning or quietly substitutes it. When adults repeatedly reduce the cognitive load, initiate every task, absorb uncertainty and sustain engagement minute by minute, a student may remain dependent even while appearing settled. The relational work has still mattered; it may have made classroom survival possible. But if the adult remains responsible, both for regulation and for the intellectual heavy lifting, then the student’s access to learning is not yet secure. Schools must distinguish between scaffolding and rescuing.
From presence to independence: Systemic next steps
If schools are to move beyond the illusion of presence, then leadership teams must critically evaluate how they measure educational access for vulnerable cohorts. Progress and pastoral meetings must ask where students sit within the attendance, presence, participation and learning framework. Recognising that a student is ‘present but depleted’ should prompt a review of cognitive load rather than a push for accelerated academic outcomes.
Decisions regarding timetables and provision must be driven by emotional and attentional stamina, rather than by a desire to quickly normalise the school week. Trauma-informed practice can make school tolerable, and early relational successes are profound achievements. These fragile gains must be protected by allowing time for consolidation.
Staff need support – and permission – to navigate the delicate boundary between scaffolding and rescuing. Educators require reflective spaces in which to examine their own practice and ensure that they are building a student’s capacity for independent learning, rather than permanently carrying the regulatory and intellectual burden.
By adopting a more precise language around educational access, schools can ensure that trauma-informed practice becomes the foundation upon which secure, sustainable and independent learning is built, rather than a plateau where students are merely managed.
