Why September Can Be So Difficult for Some Children: Looking Beyond ‘Settling In’

There is something slightly strange about the way we talk about September in education. We call it a fresh start, and in many ways it is. Classrooms are reorganised, timetables change, new relationships begin and children return with another year added to the number on their classroom door. There is an optimism to it that I genuinely like. Whatever happened last year, September seems to offer everybody another opportunity to begin.

But I am not sure children always experience beginnings in quite the same way adults do.

Children have returned to school this week and, across the country, families are finding their way back into routines that disappeared during the summer. Uniforms are being put on again, alarms are going off earlier and mornings have returned to that familiar negotiation between breakfast, shoes, bags and getting through the front door on time. For many children, this return will have been welcome. They will have missed their friends, enjoyed meeting their new teacher and perhaps needed the structure that school brings back into their lives.

For others, simply getting through these first few days will already have required far more effort than anybody at school is likely to see.

There will be children who have walked through the gates calmly after spending the previous hour saying they could not go. There will be parents who have sat in cars outside school trying to judge whether their child needs encouragement, reassurance, another five minutes or permission to stop. There will be children who have managed an entire school day without attracting anybody's concern and then reached home unable to tolerate conversation, noise, siblings or another request being made of them.

None of these experiences necessarily means that something is seriously wrong. Returning to school is an adjustment and adjustment can be uncomfortable without being harmful. Children can feel anxious about something they ultimately enjoy, become exhausted by experiences that are good for them and need time to adapt to routines that will eventually feel ordinary again.

I think that distinction matters because there is a risk of moving too far in either direction. We can dismiss genuine distress as a child simply needing to settle, but we can also begin interpreting every difficult morning, emotional evening or complaint about school as evidence that a child cannot cope with education. Neither response requires us to understand very much about the individual child.

The more useful position, I think, sits somewhere in the uncomfortable middle. We need to give children time to adjust while remaining curious about what that adjustment is actually costing them.

The Difference Between Returning and Starting Again

Adults are particularly fond of the idea of a clean slate. It is one of the reasons September feels hopeful. A new teacher can approach a child without some of the frustrations that may have developed the previous year, a different classroom can create new opportunities and everybody can agree that this year will be different.

There is real value in that.

But a fresh start is not the same thing as an erased history.

A child may be returning to the same building while experiencing almost everything inside it differently. Their classroom has moved. Their teacher has changed. The children sitting beside them may be different. Expectations have increased and work has become more difficult. The teaching assistant they trusted last year may now work somewhere else. Lunchtime might happen at a different time and the social relationships that felt predictable in July may look slightly different after six weeks apart.

For many children, these changes will be absorbed relatively quickly. For others, particularly children who rely heavily on predictability or find uncertainty difficult, each small change creates another question that has to be answered.

Where do I sit now? What happens if I finish early? Is this teacher strict? Can I still go to the same place when I need help? Who am I sitting with at lunch? What happens if I get something wrong?

Adults may never hear those questions because children do not necessarily ask them aloud.

There is also a tendency to think about school primarily in terms of lessons, when much of what children have to navigate has very little to do with the curriculum. A timetable might tell us that a child has maths at ten and science at eleven, but it says nothing about the crowded corridor between those lessons, the uncertainty of finding a seat at lunchtime, the noise of the dining hall, changing for PE, working out whether somebody was joking or being unkind, or trying to decide when it is acceptable to ask to use the toilet.

For autistic children, some of these experiences can carry an additional sensory and social load. Research exploring autistic pupils' experiences of education has repeatedly drawn attention to uncertainty, sensory environments, anxiety, belonging and masking within school. Yet even here I think we need to resist reaching too quickly for a single explanation. Not every autistic child will experience school in the same way, not every quiet child is masking and not every difficult transition is evidence of anxiety.

What the research does give us is a reason to remain curious about experiences that are easy for adults to overlook precisely because they have become ordinary to us.

When Coping Looks Remarkably Like Settling

Perhaps the most difficult thing about the first few weeks of school is that effort is not particularly easy to observe.

We tend to judge how well a child is settling through the information available to us. Did they come into school? Did they remain in lessons? Did they complete their work? Were there any incidents? Did they appear happy?

These are reasonable things to notice. The problem comes when we allow them to answer a question they cannot fully answer.

A child can be coping and still be finding something difficult.

I think families often understand this distinction particularly well because they see both sides of the school day. They may hand over a child who looks composed after a morning that has been anything but composed, and collect them several hours later just as that composure begins to disappear.

This is where the familiar conversation about a child being “fine at school” can become difficult.

School may be completely accurate. The child may have participated in lessons, spoken with friends, completed their work and shown no obvious indication of distress. Parents may also be completely accurate when they describe a child who reaches home and seems unable to manage anything else.

We sometimes treat these accounts as though one must disprove the other.

Perhaps they actually tell us something more interesting when considered together.

If a child functions very differently across two environments, the question is not necessarily which version of the child is real. Both are real. The more useful question is what changes between those environments and what the child has to do in order to manage each one.

Home may contain fewer social expectations. Clothing can come off. Conversation can stop. Food may be predictable. Nobody is expecting written work. The child may have access to familiar objects, routines and people without needing to explain themselves. School, by comparison, requires continuous adaptation to other people's expectations.

That does not make school bad and home good. It simply means they require different things from the child.

Once we think about it that way, the collapse some families describe after school begins to look less mysterious. The argument over dinner may not really be about dinner. The sibling who speaks at the wrong moment may simply be the first demand the child encounters after their capacity to manage further demands has been depleted.

What appears to be an enormous reaction to something very small can sometimes only be understood by looking at everything that came before it.

Why the First Few Days Can Mislead Us

This is also why I am cautious when people use the first week of September as evidence that a transition has been successful.

It might have been successful. There is no reason to assume otherwise.

But success during the first few days does not guarantee that the same experience will remain sustainable once days become weeks.

At the beginning of something unfamiliar, children are learning constantly. They are watching adults, noticing rules, finding classrooms, remembering routines and working out social relationships. Some children will approach this with excitement. Others will approach it cautiously. Some autistic children may camouflage uncertainty or suppress behaviours that they worry will make them stand out, while other children may simply become quieter while they work out what is expected of them.

The interesting question is what happens once the novelty disappears but the effort remains.

A child might manage five days of a noisy dining hall relatively well. By the third week, they may begin avoiding lunch. A new uniform might be tolerable at first and unbearable once tiredness accumulates. A child might initially concentrate intensely on getting everything right before gradually becoming less able to maintain that level of vigilance.

This can create the impression that behaviour has suddenly deteriorated when what has actually changed is the child's capacity to continue managing something that was difficult from the beginning.

That does not mean we should automatically interpret every later difficulty as exhaustion either. Something genuinely new may have happened. Friendship problems develop, academic demands increase, relationships with adults change and children test boundaries as they become more familiar with an environment. Behaviour is rarely explained well by one fashionable concept.

The point is not to replace “they are testing boundaries” with “they are dysregulated” and consider the job done.

The point is to investigate.

What Happened Before What We Can See?

This is one of the reasons I continue to find behaviour analysis useful when it is applied with curiosity rather than certainty. Behaviour invites us to look at context. What happened before it, what followed it, what has changed and what patterns are beginning to emerge?

But I think we sometimes interpret “what happened before” far too narrowly.

If a child becomes distressed during maths at eleven o'clock, what happened before is not necessarily whatever the teacher said at 10:59. It may include waking repeatedly during the night, struggling with uniform that morning, an unexpected supply teacher, a difficult journey into school, twenty minutes in a noisy assembly and an interaction with another pupil that nobody else noticed.

Human behaviour has a history.

That becomes especially important for children returning after difficult experiences of education.

We often tell children that September is a new beginning, but their previous experiences do not disappear during the summer holidays. A child who spent last year feeling misunderstood may enter a new classroom already uncertain about whether adults will listen. A child whose distress repeatedly resulted in removal from lessons may notice signs of the same process beginning long before the adults around them recognise why they are becoming anxious. A child who was bullied may return to the same corridors in which it happened.

The adults supporting them this year may have had absolutely nothing to do with those experiences. That is important too. New teachers deserve the opportunity to build new relationships rather than being treated as though they are responsible for everything that happened before them.

But the child also deserves the time required to discover that this relationship might be different.

Trust is difficult because it cannot really be instructed. We can tell a child that they are safe, that this year is different or that they can always come to us if something is wrong, but ultimately they decide whether those statements are true by watching what happens next.

They discover it when they get something wrong.

They discover it when they say no.

They discover it when they become overwhelmed.

They discover it when the adjustment written in their support plan becomes inconvenient to provide.

It is in those moments that children learn what our promises actually mean.

The Temptation to Tighten Things When They Begin to Unravel

Over the next few weeks, some children who currently appear to be managing well will begin to struggle. Mornings may become longer, attendance may become less consistent, behaviour may change or parents may begin reporting that evenings and weekends are increasingly difficult.

These are often the moments when adults understandably feel pressure to act.

The difficulty is that action can very quickly become synonymous with increasing control. Expectations become firmer, consequences arrive sooner, behaviour is monitored more closely and adults emphasise the importance of consistency.

Sometimes this will help. Predictability, clear boundaries and consistent responses can be enormously reassuring, particularly for children who find uncertainty difficult. I do not think supportive practice requires us to abandon expectations or assume that every demand placed on a child is harmful.

But there is an important difference between creating predictability and simply increasing pressure.

If a child's difficulty is partly being maintained by uncertainty, clearer structure may reduce it. If the problem is sensory overload, increasing consequences is unlikely to make the dining hall quieter. If a child is avoiding a lesson because they do not understand the work, a stricter attendance expectation does not teach the missing skill. If a child has learned that adults do not listen until behaviour becomes extreme, punishing the extreme behaviour without changing that history may simply reinforce the belief that communication is unsafe.

This is where critical thinking becomes more important than allegiance to any particular approach.

The same behaviour can serve different purposes for different children, and the same child can behave similarly for different reasons on different days. Our job is not to find the explanation that best fits our professional philosophy. It is to remain curious long enough to understand the child in front of us.

Perhaps We Have Been Measuring Settling in the Wrong Way

The more I think about September, the more I wonder whether some of our difficulty comes from the way we define a successful return to school.

A child who enters the building without protest, sits in the correct seat, follows instructions, completes their work and does not disrupt anybody is very easy to describe as settled. Those things matter. Children need to participate in education and classrooms need enough predictability for everybody within them to learn.

But compliance and belonging are not interchangeable.

A child might understand exactly how they are expected to behave while still feeling that very little of themselves is welcome in the environment.

Perhaps genuine settling looks slightly different.

It may be the child who eventually feels comfortable enough to tell a teacher that they have no idea what they are doing. It may be asking for a break before reaching the point of overwhelm, admitting that lunchtime is lonely or telling somebody that the noise in a classroom is making it impossible to concentrate. It might even involve a child showing more disagreement than they did during the first week because they have begun to trust that disagreement will not destroy the relationship.

There is an uncomfortable possibility here for adults.

Sometimes a child becoming safer can initially make them look less compliant.

If our only measure of progress is how little difficulty a child creates for the adults around them, we may completely misunderstand what that change means.

Of course, safety cannot mean that every behaviour is acceptable or that children should never encounter frustration, boundaries or expectations. Part of growing up involves learning to navigate situations we would not always choose. Education necessarily asks children to do difficult things.

The question is whether we are teaching children how to manage difficulty or simply rewarding them for hiding it.

I think there is a profound difference between the two.

A Final Reflection

As I write this, children have only just returned. It is far too early to know what this academic year will become for many of them. Some children who were terrified about returning may discover within days that the reality is far better than they imagined. Others who currently appear completely comfortable may find things increasingly difficult as expectations accumulate. Most will probably experience something far less dramatic, with good days, difficult days and a gradual return to routine.

Perhaps that uncertainty is exactly why September asks something important of the adults around children.

It asks us not to decide too quickly what we are seeing.

The child crying at the school gate is not necessarily incapable of managing school. The child walking through it smiling is not necessarily managing without difficulty. The parent describing an awful evening is not disproved by the teacher who saw a good day, and the teacher who saw a happy child is not necessarily missing something because home was difficult afterwards.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

Children are complicated because people are complicated. Their behaviour is shaped by relationships, learning histories, sensory experiences, expectations, sleep, confidence, friendships, uncertainty, skills, previous experiences and dozens of ordinary events that will never appear on an assessment form. Trying to reduce that complexity to whether a child has or has not “settled” can prevent us from noticing the much more interesting story unfolding underneath.

Over the coming weeks, I think the children who struggle visibly will rightly attract our attention. But I also hope we remain curious about the children who appear to be doing everything right. The child who never asks for help, who agrees before the question has been finished, who seems determined not to inconvenience anybody and who reaches home with nothing left may be communicating something too, just in a form that makes fewer demands on the adults around them.

Ultimately, perhaps settling into school should not be measured by how quickly a child learns to tolerate whatever the environment asks of them. Nor should it mean removing every difficult experience until school becomes completely comfortable, because no meaningful environment can promise that.

Maybe it is something more balanced than either of those things.

It is the gradual development of enough trust that difficulty can be communicated before it becomes crisis. Enough predictability that uncertainty does not dominate the day. Enough flexibility that individual needs can be accommodated without removing every expectation. Enough safety that a child can make a mistake, disagree, ask for help and still know that the relationship will survive.

That kind of settling is harder to measure than attendance, incidents or completed work. It cannot always be seen from the back of a classroom and it certainly cannot be declared complete after the first week of September.

But I suspect it tells us far more about whether a child is genuinely finding their place in school than quiet compliance ever could.