Hello. We are the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, or ACAMH for short. Good afternoon. Very welcome to this session of the ACAMH ACEs special interest group. I'm on Arnon Bentovim, and I'm chair of the ACEs sig group. And it's a great pleasure to welcome you and to welcome our speaker, TAMI Alikhani, this afternoon. Sorry. The picture of me is slightly in the sunshine. It's this unexpected spring sunshine that we're getting in our part of Sussex. This afternoon is a very, very important presentation. The title, as you know, is "Why I Didn't Send My Child Back to School After COVID?" And looks at the rise in home education. But I think the presentation goes well beyond that. Tami trained at the Anna Freud and the Tavi and brings a psychodynamic lens to her role as an educational psychologist in Camden. And I think they have a very interesting project there, the trauma-informed school project, whole systems changes. And Tami is very interested in the field of trauma and neurodivergence, a very important theme, very much of concern to many members of the association where the issue of neurodivergence, and trauma, and stress is an ever-present issue. So I think that what this research, which Tami is going to share with us, has enabled her to do is to really look at psychosocial dimensions of the education transitions associated with COVID and looks at to how schools could manage to maintain an ability to meet the needs of vulnerable children, particularly, and looks at critical evidence for the importance and value of a whole school trauma-informed approach and meaningful inclusion, particularly for children who are vulnerable. And this is such an important issue because, very recently, as you know, the government has announced the notion of managing send children with special needs to be included within mainstream schooling. And the challenges of this are enormous. And I think it's tremendously valuable, Tami, that you're going to really try to broaden the issue, looking at the very real concerns about the way that school manage the needs of vulnerable children and the needs for a really whole scale way of really revisioning our school system. So this is a very important moment and a very important theme. So, Tami, thank you very much for agreeing to present to us this afternoon. And I'd like you to start the presentation now. Would like to remind our participants, please use the Q&A to ask any questions that you'd like to ask. Please let us know something about yourselves in the chat so we know something about yourselves. And I hope that we'll gradually be able to have a good exchange between participants and Tami so that we can really look at these issues in detail. So, Tami, please. Thank you so much, Arnon. I think you've really beautifully put together the bigger picture, which is really why I agreed and was happy to discuss the research because I did this now three years ago. I think I completed the actual research. So, yeah. So I just want to say thank you so much for having me and for everybody being here. I know everyone's time is stretched, so I'm genuinely grateful that you've chosen to spend this time thinking together, I hope, about something complex. And as Arnon said, very important. I'll just start with some very brief context. So home education is not new. And for most of human history, children have effectively been educated at home. Mass compulsory schooling as we know it really only took shape in the late 19th century, and modern home education re-emerged more visibly in the '60s and the '70s, influenced by critiques of standardised schooling. And then it grew further in popularity in the UK in the '80s and '90s as legal rights became clearer. So this idea of home ed is not a new phenomenon. It's not even really the focus, as you'll see, of my study. But I did want to give an appraisal a bit of home education because I obviously got very deeply into that literature. And generally, families choose home education for many, many different reasons, from a desire for more personalised learning to often religious or philosophical beliefs, lifestyle preferences, or simply greater flexibility. The motivations are rarely singular and the daily routines often reflect very different educational philosophies. So it's a really heterogeneous group that we have of home educators. But across that diversity, what tends to remain consistent is that parents ultimately believe they're acting in their children's best interests. So this study was undertaken during my doctoral training, which began in 2020. The research questions took shape in 2021. And most of the data was gathered between 2022 and 2023. So in the immediate aftermath of the lockdowns. What interested me was something quite specific, parents who'd moved from mainstream schooling into home education following the pandemic. I wasn't setting out to evaluate whether home education works, but I was interested in how parents made sense of their decision. So we're now three years post-COVID, thankfully, but I'd like to use today's study as a starting point not to revisit the pandemic, but to think together about what those decisions may still be signalling now. So I'll just begin with how the research came about. Briefly explaining the methodology, because I think the way we ask questions shapes what we hear. Then I'll share what parents have described what they told me in the various phases of the study. And from there, I hope to widen the lens because this isn't only about home education. As Arnon has mentioned, it raises questions about fit for children, the flexibility of our systems, and how educational systems are responding under pressure. So I'd like to end the framework for thinking about participation and voice particularly, and how we might centre children more meaningfully in systems that can sometimes feel quite rigid. So when schools closed in March 2020, something that we usually take for granted was interrupted, the idea that school is simply where children are meant to be. Now, from a research perspective, it was a unplanned natural experiment. It's not something anyone would ever choose, but it created this rare moment where every day assumptions were suddenly made visible. And what struck me during that first lockdown, apart from how bizarre it all felt and the uncertainty that was frightening, was that really, for me, at the same time, parts of my daily life became quieter. There was less rushing, fewer packed schedules. Personally, I slept more, ate better. I spent less, and I had a really nice time with my son that just didn't feel squeezed between everything else. So in some ways, a layer of pressure had lifted and that felt really good. And I want to say that really mindfully because I'm very aware that this perspective that I was having sat alongside a much harsher reality, that for many families, the pandemic was devastating. And we now know the longer-term impact on children and young people's mental health in particular has been significant. And I definitely don't want to gloss over that. But within that complexity, I couldn't ignore something, that, for me, aspects of life had felt easier and in some ways even better. And at the time, I didn't quite know what I wanted to do with that observation. But I had a sense it mattered. And I wanted to investigate it further. So it wasn't until I began my placements one in a ACAMHs MDT team and then alongside a local authority educational psychology service that the question basically sharpened because I started seeing something that I hadn't really heard about, but very much on the increase Emotionally-Based School Avoidance, or EBSA, which is now really rife, I think. More children were not returning and schools were reporting rising de-registration. I began to feel as though this wasn't only about a temporary disruption. Something about what we assume to be normal had shifted. And I remember during that time, we were all talking about this new normal. And in many areas of life, that phrase turned out to be true. The way we work, the way we're meeting now, the way we access services, things that once felt very fixed have proved surprisingly adaptable. So I find myself wondering whether schooling had perhaps also moved from something taken for granted to something that was perhaps being actively reconsidered. Home education at that moment, therefore, felt like a really interesting lens through which to explore this shift. To me, the rising numbers didn't really just look like a trend. They seemed to be signalling something about how families were experiencing education and perhaps life more broadly. So that's really where the research question took shape. OK, I'm going to just pause for a moment. It would be great if we can have a little activity. So for whoever's online, if you have a phone nearby, you can just point your camera at the QR code and it should take you straight to a page with a short question. And we're going to try and generate a word cloud together. First question is just simple. What comes to mind when you hear home education? And you can just type a word or short phrase that occurs to you. No overthinking. And I'm just going to share the Menti screen with everyone so we can see this together. Oh, nice. Isolation. Interesting. Unfamiliar. Relief. Concern. Joy. Safeguarding. That's a common one, yeah. So thank you. This gives me a sense of where people are starting from. Vulnerability. Yep. Creativity. So a real range of different words from joy, and relief, and privilege, and creativity to things like isolation, lack of friends, safeguarding, vulnerability. And I think our responses to thinking about home education are quite confused and quite ambivalent, really. We do hold both these perspectives. And I think that is what's also happening. I think when you're standing outside of the home education community, lack of friends-- I mean, it's interesting because a lot of the research talks about the fear that kids, they're just not going to socialise. And then you ask families who are doing it-- that's one of the first things they refute, is that-- so perhaps they're not socialising in quite the same way as kids in a classroom of 30 with all the children who are at the same age and everything. But it's funny, in a way, the language that we have in our minds around what home education might be. It's just interesting. So brilliant. I'm now going to move it to the next question. So on your screen on your phone, you should get this question, which asks which statement comes closest to how you currently think about home education? And you have some options that you can choose from. I'm hoping that that's available on your Menti phone. I'm not doing it myself in real-time. So the options are a positive or values based choice, a response to systems that aren't meeting children's needs, are risky or concerning alternatives to schools, something associated with very particular types of families. And interestingly, that came up in a lot of my interview data that people do hold a-- I don't like to use the word stereotype, but we have an idea of what we think a very particular type. Risky, yeah, or concerning alternative to schools, too. A response to systems that aren't meeting children's needs. The answers are coming in. So, yeah, response to systems that aren't meeting children's needs is clearly winning as why you understand people are currently turning to it. I think, most interestingly, is that nobody is thinking about it as a positive or values based choice, which I think is really, really telling actually. And, of course, the safeguarding issue in the risk involved and what it means for parents to undertake that responsibility, which then leads to perhaps something associated with very particular types of families and then not being sure, maybe holding some of that ambivalence. So thank you. That was just to get an idea of where people are coming from around their views on home education. I think I've done that the wrong way. I haven't done that correctly. Dalia took me really well through and I forgot to do the one thing I need to do. Yeah, so assumptions about whom education is for came up implicitly, as I said, in many of my parent's narratives as well. Before going further, I think it might just be helpful to be clear about language. So in the study, I refer to Home Education, or HE, to describe education that takes place outside of formal schools and is directed by parents or guardians. The legal term in the UK is elective home education, and this is grounded in the Section 7 of the Education Act 1996, which states parents must ensure their child receives suitable education either by regular attendance at school or otherwise. So while the legal category is known as elective, as will become evident and even from your answers on the Mentimeter, that term doesn't always neatly reflect family's lived experiences. And that's the reason I have preferred to use the broader term of home education throughout. It's also important to distinguish that home education is not the same as other arrangements that could look the same. So it's not emergency remote learning during the pandemic, for example, which remains school-directed provision. It's not EOTAS, which is Education Otherwise Than At School. And this is where the local authority commissions and retains responsibility for provision. And it's usually got through a big fight in tribunals through an EHCP plan. It's not flexi-schooling because that's also where a child tends to remain on a school roll, and then attends part-time by agreement with the school. And it also doesn't comprise of those children missing in education. And finally, as I've said before, home education itself is not a single model. Families adopt a wide range of approaches, from more structured to more autonomous. This study is really not about evaluating those choices or home education, but it's about understanding how families arrived at them and how they made sense of that. So again, just to contextualise where this research sits, both in terms of the data and in terms of what's been circulating publicly, when I first started my scoping in 2021 for the literature and everything else, there was a genuine uncertainty about what rising deregistration actually meant. Was this really just a temporary pandemic spike or was something more sustained happening? If we look at the numbers historically, so 2018, around 57,000 children were recorded as home educated in England. Now we know that home education numbers are never pure and clean because it's very hard to get those records. But quite clearly, by 2020, 24, to 25, that figure, which was close to 180,000, represents a three-fold increase over six years. So even allowing for the fact that the home education data isn't perfectly clean because there's no single national register, the overall pattern, I do think is clear, and I think the rise is real, and it hasn't simply dropped down back to pre-pandemic levels. So this study specifically sits within this period of continuing growth. And I think it matters because it wasn't just a wobble. It suggests that what families were describing during COVID may not have been a fleeting reaction, but part of a wider shift in how education is being experienced and negotiated. And at the same time, there's been no shortage of headlines. There's concern. There's curiosity and there's critique. But I think what struck me was that while the numbers were being discussed and debated, there was comparatively less in-depth qualitative work exploring how parents themselves were making sense of that. So there was this interesting gap between the scale of what we were hearing and the lived experience. And that's the space where this study stepped in. So it was within this context of rising numbers, shifting deregistration patterns, and limited insight into lived experiences that the central question began to take shape. And at this stage, as I've said before, I wasn't trying to explain or categorise families. I just wanted to understand how they were making sense of this. And that's the focus that shaped the research questions that followed. So my research questions, the study asked essentially two linked things. First, asked how many families felt they had no genuine option but to deregister? And then secondly, for those who felt the school was no longer a viable option, what drove that decision? To explore these questions, I used a mixed methods design. Phase 1 was an online survey with UK-based parents who had deregistered. It had to be after the pandemic. And this allowed me to get a sense of the overall spread, the numbers, the quantitative part of the mixed methods of the study, and to show me how parents position their decision and what proportion described feeling pushed towards deregistration rather than freely choosing it. The survey also functioned as an opportunity sampling because it allowed me to identify and then purposefully invite parents who describe their decision as constrained into phase 2. Phase 2 involved what is called the free association narrative interview. It came out of psychodynamic thinking. It's a nod to Freudian free association. And it was with parents who stated in the survey that they felt they had no option but to deregister. So these allowed me to explore experiences more fully. So essentially, the survey gave me scale and the interviews gave me depth. So phase 1 involved, as I said, an online survey of 67 UK-based parents and they had deregistered their children following the pandemic. The survey itself was intentionally brief. Parents were asked to select a statement that best reflected how they experience their decision to deregister their child. And the options were designed to distinguish between three positions, those who saw deregistration as the better of two options, those who preferred home education even though school might have worked, and those who felt mainstream schooling simply did not work and that they had no real alternative. So the aim here isn't to capture every nuance, but it was to just understand proportion-- how widely were these different positions represented? Additionally, at the bottom of the survey, there was a single OpenText box inviting parents to just share anything else they wished. And I just thought, I probably wouldn't do much with that, but I'll come to that in the next stage. So results of the survey of the 67 parents, 65.7%, so 2/3 essentially, selected the statement indicating that they felt they had no real option but to deregister. Just under a third described it as a preferred choice, and a really small minority described it as the better of two poor options. So what stands out here is that for the majority of the sample, deregistration wasn't framed as ideological or positive thing. It was experience as something they felt compelled to do. And as I said, although the survey was brief, the OpenText box generated a lot of qualitative material, much more than I'd expected, and I didn't then want that to disappear into percentages. So I carried out an inductive content analysis. And I have in the thesis it is quantified. You can see percentages, but I think it's more interesting just to talk about the meaning of what came out of that. So finally, four overarching categories emerged. I had 32 codes from the narratives. And then they came into four overarching categories. And they don't explain everything, but they do help illuminate what sat behind the three statements that the parents had selected. So in the first category, which I've termed discovery of advantages to home education during lockdown, this was most strongly reflected among the parents who selected statement two, so those who believed that school could probably work, but they chose to deregister. So I think they discovered positive things through the lockdown. They described noticing shifts in their children-- calmer mornings, reduced overwhelm, better relationships at home. One parent wrote, during his time off school due to the COVID lockdown, my son flourished mentally and physically and it became clear that he's better off at home. Another described, we saw a different child at home, more relaxed, more curious. So what's striking is that these accounts aren't necessarily anti-school, but they were comparative. Lockdown revealed something. And once seen, it was difficult to ignore. The second category was child well-being prioritised. And this was most strongly associated with statement three or the parents who felt they had no real option. So for these families, deregistration wasn't framed as exploration or opportunity. It was framed as a necessity. Mental health concerns, particularly ACAMH were repeatedly cited. Parents describing anxiety escalating after schools reopened, panic attacks, school refusal, physical symptoms. A small proportion of that were directly related to the COVID virus but not really. It was mainly around the ACAMH. So my son's mental health hit crisis point. The stress of getting to school daily was affecting our whole family. Another said there was no other school that would work for him. So in these accounts, home education is positioned as protective, again, rather than ideological. It's not a philosophical shift, but something done to stabilise and prevent further harm. The third category of perceived lack of provision or support to meet individual needs was overwhelmingly concentrated for those who selected statement three. And many of these parents referenced send, particularly ACAMH, again, alongside long waits for assessment or support that just felt partial or insufficient. There were repeated references to unmet EHCP needs. Sensory overwhelm was a really big one. Exclusion or threat of exclusion. Threats of fines because they weren't going in enough to school. And one parent wrote, school said they could no longer meet need. The online provision they offered us was not suitable. Another said simply, he was surviving, not learning. So what comes through here is a sense that families had reached the limit of what they could keep holding. The fourth category extended beyond individual school experiences and into broader dissatisfaction with the education system. And again, most pronounced among statement three parents, but also present among the statement two. And overall, parents describe rigidity and inflexibility, a sense that schools were too pressured, systems that felt hard to navigate. One wrote, it felt like a conveyor belt. Another described constant pressure to fit into a system that didn't fit him. Reading these responses, I found myself wondering what sat underneath them. What does it feel like to move from really trying to make school work to deciding it can't? And that curiosity shaped phase 2, I think. So I'll just let you process a bit of that information. But as Arnon introduced, I was trained at the Tavi and my phase 2 involved now very in-depth interviews. So that was a broad look at the scale. And I had four mothers from four different parts of the UK from different parts from Scotland, the Midlands, Sussex, and London. And to explore their stories, I used free association narrative interviews, which is a psychosocial qualitative method. This approach assumes that when people describe emotionally significant experiences, their accounts are shaped not only by their conscious explanation, but also by affect and their relational histories and dynamics. So the interview I had was very minimally structured and it was totally participant-led. I basically asked one question at the beginning of the interview, where I invited each mother to tell the story of how she arrived at deregistration. And I just then followed where the narrative went. Each participant took part in two interviews and in the thesis, I developed pen portraits for each case, attending to biography, tone, and relational dynamics, which is part of the psychosocial method. If you want to read about that, you can look at the thesis. But for today, I'm focusing on the patterns that emerged across these cases. Although four participants sounds small, this work prioritises depth. And each case involved two interviews, full transcriptions, and a very layered analysis allowing sustained engagement with each story. But I would like to honour-- my gratitude for the four participants. I'm going to give you mini profiles of the four mothers and their child. So Grace discovered during lockdown that her autistic son, who she didn't know yet even that he-- nobody had referred him, but who had been falling behind at school. He flourished when learning was personalised. She later learned he had been experiencing meltdowns and saying he wished he was dead, something that had not been conveyed to her. And although for her deregistration was framed as academic, well-being definitely sat close behind it. Kelly had already navigated multiple tribunals. Her adopted daughter's complex needs and separation anxiety meant that school was a daily source of distress. And for them, lockdown just brought this visible relief, better sleep, calmer days, and reduced stress for both of them, really. For Steph, whose son was born abroad to a Middle Eastern father who he didn't see since he was an infant and who she described as the only Brown-skinned boy in their village, he was academically gifted and his attainment kept masking escalating distress. She mentioned how school would just tell her how brilliant he was. And just was so confusing for her because he wasn't brilliant at home. And then that actually ultimately led to repeated exclusions and then off-rolling. So she didn't even know that she was electively home educating because school off-rolled and they informed the local authority that she was now a home educator. And this really led Steph to question her own perceptions, because before, she accepted it and stepped outside of the system in a way. And Karen, her journey was a bit different. Her dissatisfaction really predated the pandemic, but was shaped by her cultural background and her move to the UK. Lockdown just sharpened an existing belief that the system didn't align with her values or her son's needs, particularly around curriculum and inclusion. So across all four deregistration followed a growing sense that continuing in mainstream school was no longer viable. And across the four interviews and the interviews, four interlinked themes emerged. So they're presented here sequentially because I think for these families, this is possibly how the process unfolded, not as isolated reasons, but as a decision over time. So first, I have lockdown as a catalyst. Lockdown created exposure. And for some parents, it functioned almost as a risk-free trial of alternative learning. And I think overall, perhaps the experience during the lockdowns possibly also intensified their pre-existing disillusionment. They saw it very clearly. So then that exposure shifted power. And then that shift made the inclusion tensions harder to ignore. And then those tensions led to a new understanding or revelations. And for these families, I think that cumulative process ultimately led to deregistration. So I'll just go a bit more deeply into those themes. With lockdown as catalysts, several of the participants, even in phase 1 as well, described lockdown not as the origin of dissatisfaction, but as a moment of clarity. So of my participants, one said that lockdown gave us a space to see what was actually happening. And another referred to it as a trial. With schooling relocated into home, parents observed learning in real-time. And for the first time, they were positioned alongside the curriculum rather than outside of it. So for Grace, directly teaching her son revealed that work that was previously framed as effort-related was, in fact, pitched way beyond his level, and what had been interpreted as reluctance became visible as a real mismatch. Across the four narratives, lockdown functioned as an unintended comparison point. It didn't create distress where none existed, it just illuminated this contrast, and particularly around regulation, pace, and mental health. And I think that once that contrast had been experienced, returning to the previous arrangement felt qualitatively different. So that lockdown then was less of a cause and more of a catalyst. The second theme, shifting sands of power, obviously concern power, both structural and psychological. Structurally, this included blocked referrals, EHCP refusals, exclusions, and protracted tribunals. One mother described training herself in SEN law in order to secure provision that had already been recognised as necessary. And psychologically more than anything, all the participants described the power imbalances and deferring to school is the expert authority, even when their maternal instincts suggested otherwise. Grace, for example, reflected that she did defer to them quite a lot, despite later feeling she had been fobbed off. Steph described feeling like a naughty, little schoolgirl in meetings. And over time, this imbalance became internalised. So doubt replaced certainty and advocacy became exhausting. So importantly, this theme also included a reversal. So for one participant, the turning point came when she told her son, I'm never going to force you back to school. And she described him as a different child from that moment. So here, we can see that deregistration reconfigured authority between parent and institution and between parent and child. And I think the metaphor of shifting sands captures that instability and movement in a sense that the ground had been unreliable and that lockdown altered the distribution of power. I have to say, participants were careful not to individualise blame. Teachers were often described with empathy or positioned as constrained within wider systemic pressures. But the powerlessness described was not singular, it was systemic. The third theme concerning inclusion, not as policy but as lived experience. So children were formally included. They were enrolled, present, attending. Yet, several parents described a disjunction between attendance and meaningful participation. So Karen's son, she said when he went back, just drifted unnoticed. Nobody saw him. And another appeared to cope academically while distress intensified. Requests for flexi-schooling were refused. They did try and find alternative ways once they were going back. But for these families, inclusion seemed to operate in practise as binary. It's either full mainstream attendance or withdrawal. There was little perceived elasticity between those two poles. So this theme doesn't reject inclusion as an ideal, but rather it questions how inclusion is enacted, and physical presence did not necessarily equate to belonging, safety, or even access to learning. The final theme concerned the revelations and the realisation, once something had been seen clearly about how their child learns, about what was alleviating distress, and about what was exacerbating it, returning back to that arrangement no longer felt neutral. So one mother asked herself, how can I justify sending him back, if not to him, then to myself? She wasn't describing anger. It was more like a threshold shift, the moment that she realised that this was when she made that decision. So for each mother, the content of the revelation or the realisation differed. But collectively, I think these moments altered what felt tolerable or defensible. And going back was no longer simply a return to normal. For them, it required a moral and relational justification both to their child and to themselves. So I've highlighted already the term elective home education. But I think, as we can see in the survey phase of the study, nearly 2/3 of respondents said they felt they had no option but to deregister. So this is not a free or an ideological choice. It felt like the only viable option within the system as they had experienced it. And when we look across both phases, the survey and the narrative interviews, we do see this consistent pattern. Deregistration was rarely about rejecting education or even school. It was about responding to a perceived lack of viable alternatives. It was about prioritising well-being and it was about an eroding trust in provision. And for some, it was about reaching a point where continuing as before just no longer felt acceptable. That doesn't mean there were literally no other options. But subjectively, I think the alternatives no longer felt workable. And I think that subjective experience shaped the decision-making, ultimately. So having traced how that threshold has shifted through the lockdowns, the power dynamics, inclusion, and then the personal realisations, I want to just pause briefly to reflect on the scope and limits of the work before widening the lens. So there were a lot of strengths, I think. I think the mixed methods design allowed me to capture both that proportion and depth. The distribution in the survey and the meaning-making in the interviews. I think the pandemic context created such an unusual moment where schooling was disrupted, making ordinarily embedded dynamics possibly more visible. And through using the psychosocial lens, I could pay attention not only to what parents said, but to their emotional and relational processes shaping their decisions. And through the free association narrative interview, this meant the participants structured their stories in their own terms. I'm not saying it was a therapy session, but I think it was therapeutic for them to be able to have that space to really think about it and to integrate their experience. There were many limitations, too. So the survey sample was relatively small and self-selecting. And accessing home educating families is not straightforward. So I think this is a common limitation in the home ed literature generally. There's often a lot of mistrust between some of the home educating families and statutory systems. So when I initially shared the survey in online groups, I mean, most of them declined to circulate it once they realised I was doing research and maybe I was linked to a local authority. It was only after wonderful clinical psychologist called Naomi Fisher, who works really closely with home educating and neurodivergent families-- and she has a really visible presence in the community. So she shared the study on social media. And then suddenly, I had my 67 participants. So I'm very grateful to Naomi for that and also for the work that she does to advocate for families who she knows homeschooling is better for them. And as we've said before, usually neurodivergent population and those with EBSA. So really, this sample reflects those networks and that moment, which does not make it very generalizable. I do get that. And I think the survey itself, the framing inevitably simplified quite complex motivations. But then with the qualitative phase, it went into more depth. But again, it only focused on mother's accounts. And whilst it gave depth, it doesn't capture the full range of perspectives. There was no direct child voice. And I also didn't gather views from fathers, schools, or other professionals. And as with all interpretive research, the analysis is shaped by my own positioning as a practitioner researcher. So very clear that this isn't a universal account. It is a study rooted in a particular group of families at a particular moment in time. But I think it's important just to give a nod to what's happening now within an active policy context. There are ongoing debates about monitoring, safeguarding, and children's rights in relation to home education. Some see increased oversight as necessary protection, and others experience it as a real infringement on Democratic rights. Experiencing too much scrutiny, too much surveillance. So research anyway, in this area doesn't generally take place in a neutral space. For me, perhaps the most significant gap, both here and in the wider literature is the absence of children's voices. So I do think that future work could really benefit from bringing together child, parent, and professional perspectives. But despite these limits, the patterns that emerged raise wider questions not only about home education, but how we think about inclusion, agency, and well-being within mainstream education. So before I move into the discussion, I wanted to just say something about framing. When I think the webinar was first advertised, perhaps even a couple of years ago, there was a suggestion that I might explore drivers and motivations through psychological frameworks. And that's how I wrote it in my thesis, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, and so on. So I have engaged with those frameworks. I examine the motivations and drivers through those lenses, and they were really useful in situating the findings within established theory. But I think preparing for today and sitting with the fact that we're now three years on and that I'm working as a qualified EP in community contexts, I found myself wondering if that would be the most helpful thing for today. So rather than reapplying a psychological framework to explain family's decisions, I'm more interested in asking what this research might be telling us now, not only about why families left, but about what it reveals about systems under pressure, about inclusion, participation, safety, and fit. So instead of walking through a theoretical model, I'd like to open up a more reflective space to think together about what these patterns might mean for our current practise. And I'll introduce a few themes to guide that discussion. So just to really quickly recap what participants had reported. Across both phase 1 and 2, families described discovering that learning could look different. So more tailored approaches, greater flexibility in pace and rhythm, reduced stress and sensory overwhelm, particularly for their neurodivergent children. Space to go deeper into interests. Calmer home environments. Being able to build a curriculum that aligns with values. So none of the mothers I spoke to set out with a long-held ideological commitment to home education. They could more accurately be described as accidental home educators. But across all four accounts, however different, there was something consistent. And that is that they were trying to do what they believed was best for their child. And perhaps that helps explain both the continued rise in numbers and the growing volume of public discussion around this issue. So I was looking for the most recent headline that I could find. So this is January 5, just over a month ago, 15 of January. It's fairly representative of what appears when you search rising home education numbers. The dominant explanations are consistent-- mental health concerns, unmet need, anxiety, exclusions, dissatisfaction with school, and then references to EBSA and autism also come up repeatedly. When I started the study, it wasn't clear whether deregistration was simply a short-term pandemic spike. We now know the numbers have remained elevated. But what's striking is that the category cited in the media reports closely mirror what did emerge in the study. So in that sense, the findings resonate with the wider public conversation. But what I think the qualitative work adds is texture because I don't think it was simply dissatisfaction. I think families are ultimately describing a narrowing of perceived options, a growing sense that, over time, school no longer felt viable for their particular child. And I think when we frame it this way, the question shifts from why families leave to what conditions make staying feel impossible. And when increasing numbers of families described that narrowing, it invites us to look not only at individual choices, but at the systems surrounding them. And for those of us working in child and adolescent mental health, I think that shift matters because many of the children being described in these headlines are already known to services. These are the young people presenting with anxiety, EBSA, autistic burnout, relational trauma, and chronic dysregulation. So this isn't peripheral to clinical work. It sits right at the intersection of education and mental health. So if we just then widen the lens beyond the individual families, I think what does come into view is a system under strain. And I don't say that critically. I do say it recognising how many of you/we are holding enormous complexity every day, rising referrals, long waiting lists, massive increase in neurodevelopmental mental assessments demands. Schools are stretched and families are exhausted. So in that context, deregistration may not be a separate phenomenon. I think it's part of the same pattern. And when systems operate under sustained pressure, it affects how thinking happens. And we see this clinically all the time. When anxiety rises, the reflective capacity narrows in families, in teams, and in organisations. Work from the Tavistock tradition and systems psychodynamics is very helpful here. It tells us and it suggests that organisations, like individuals, develop social defences against anxiety. And these aren't intentional acts of harm. They are attempts to cope, to stabilise, and to manage uncertainty. But over time, those defences can restrict flexibility and they constrain thinking. So Melanie Klein famously described the infant and how it moves quickly into split positions, into good and bad. So we have good schools and failing schools, resilient children and difficult children, engaged parents and resilient families. And their nuance becomes much harder to hold and ambivalence becomes uncomfortable. But I would say that psychoanalytic thinking would suggest that the capacity to tolerate mixed feelings, to hold good and bad together, is a more integrated and stable position. It's what allows systems and people to reflect rather than to react. And then Bion's concept of containment helps us to think about what happens next. Because for thinking to occur, emotional experience has to be held somewhere. It has to be processed. It has to be digested and then transformed into something that can be thought about. So when containment falters, the anxiety doesn't go away. It just moves. And in hierarchical systems, it often moves downward landing with the least power. And sometimes that's the child. Sometimes it's the family. Sometimes it's the frontline practitioner. So just thinking about when we work inside these systems for long periods of time and the pressure doesn't simply vanish, it can then be projected onto others as a result of these splitting defences, and often moves downwards. So it can move from policy into local authorities, from leadership teams into classroom, and from adults onto children. And often without anyone intending harm, the child ends up carrying more of the system's anxiety than we'd ever want or realise. And we see this clinically. A young person presents with distress, with withdrawal, refusal, dysregulation. And the focus understandably lands on the child. But at times, what we're witnessing is a child responding to strain that sits well beyond them and well beyond their ability to control any of that. And I think that's where this links to the ACE's thinking and the ACE's special interest because we often talk about adversity in terms of home environments. But chronic stress within institutions can also shape nervous systems over time. I work with a family last year, and the social services team who opened up the file for the child in need told the mother very, very plainly that this was systemic neglect that had absolutely nothing to do with her. I hadn't even heard of that category of systemic neglect, but that is now a category. So when needs remain misaligned, and when flexibility is limited, and when ruptures aren't repaired, schools or good settings can unintentionally become a place associated with trauma rather than safety. And it doesn't mean that schools are harmful spaces. It just means that under sustained pressure, unintended consequences can emerge. So if we're serious about children not carrying system strain, we have to ask how do we increase adult and organisational capacity to hold this complexity so that children don't have to hold it alone? So if we accept that the sustained pressure can narrow our reflective capacity, then the question really becomes what helps to widen it? In my current role, the majority of referrals I'm seeing are centred around ACAMH needs and behaviour. So all the things that I've mentioned, things that are difficult for adults to manage, shut down, dysregulation, distress. But here is where a trauma-informed lens, I think, not only helps this crucial, it's the answer. Trauma-informed lens asks us to see behaviour as communication. And behaviour is rarely random. It's signalling something, usually an unmet social, emotional, or relational need. And a child who cannot yet articulate what is overwhelming them will show us instead. But if we focus only on the behaviour itself, stopping it, sanctioning it, rewarding alternatives, we may then reduce what is visible without actually addressing what's underneath it and what's driving it. And schools, quite understandably, rely on behaviour policies to create clarity, consistency. But when systems are under sustained pressure and that flexibility narrows, for some children, particularly those with additional needs, those expectations that are manageable for many can become persistently dysregulating. They're set up to fail. They cannot follow what is being told they must do. And I think in that state, behaviour is less about defiance and more about distress. So frameworks, such as ARC, which is Attachment, Regulation, and Competency, they remind us that learning sits on foundations, on safety and relationships, support with regulation, and a gradual development of skills. When a child moves outside their window of tolerance into a fight, flight, or freeze, their prefrontal cortex, essentially their brain that needs to be online for learning, becomes less available. So their working memory reduces, their cognitive flexibility drops. And this is not about motivation. It really is about physiology. And learning becomes significantly harder. And I think many of the families in the study were describing children whose regulatory systems were overwhelmed in mainstream settings. The sensory load, the social navigation, the pace, the performance pressure, all interacting with individual profiles. One mother said it so beautifully. She said, I believe if children aren't happy and if they don't feel safe, they're not going to learn. Full stop. I think you can put in all the interventions in the world to move them on academically, but ultimately, it won't work if they're not happy. So when families stepped away from school, they weren't rejecting education. They were trying to restore conditions in which learning could happen. And trauma-informed thinking also doesn't stop with children because adults have windows of tolerance too. So teachers working with an accountability demands or staffing shortages and ofsted pressures, and also all the rising ACAMH and behavioural needs, they're managing a lot. So they're stretched. But when adults are stretched, their reflective capacity narrows. But Bruce Perry, who's a wonderful voice in the trauma-informed community, puts it really beautifully. He says, a calm, regulated adult can help regulate a dysregulated child, but a dysregulated adult can never calm anyone. So children borrow our nervous systems before they can manage their own. So a trauma-informed system isn't just about responding to distressed pupils, it is about protecting psychological safety across the whole ecology for adults, as well as children. In my role as an EP, I see how powerful it is when I can have protected reflective space. It's not easy to give that, but supervisions, I think, are so needed. When adults have somewhere to process and metabolise their anxiety and their experiences, their own window of tolerance widens and their thinking expands, and that directly affects children and their nervous systems. So this brings us back to a broader question. How do we design educational systems that actively protect regulation and relationship, especially in anxious times? So we are nearly at the end and I've got just a couple more slides, but I'm going to now rush through the last two. I was going to ask people to share in the chat. By all means, do. But I'm just going to go through the slides so that we can finish on time. But I think if we're serious about designing systems and widening capacity rather than narrow it, we really have to ask the question of what is education ultimately trying to do. I mean, what is the real purpose of school? And I really mean that genuinely. And I do wonder what comes to mind. And I imagine things like perhaps employability, socialisation, knowledge, yeah, social mobility. And all those things are important. But I think what strikes me is that however we answer the question of what education for, that answers shapes the system. Those answers shape curriculum. They shape behaviour policies. They shape what gets prioritised and what gets squeezed. So I think perhaps this research isn't simply about dissatisfaction with schools. I think it's about moments where the purposes families hold, such as safety, identity, emotional stability, and belonging, don't quite align with the purpose of systems as structurally organised around. So this doesn't necessarily mean that schools are failing. I see how much they are holding every day. But that doesn't often align with parents priorities whose-- is my child safe enough to learn? And when I think about, for example, the many brilliant autistic learners I've worked with, I'm just struck by how extraordinary they can be when they're allowed to immerse deeply in areas of interest. They're focused, creative, and precise. And yet mainstream environments can still position those differences as problems to manage rather than capacities to build on. So we're often asking children to adapt to systems more than systems adapt to children. So if inclusion is genuinely our aim, then difference has to be expected and not simply accommodated. And we've also got a whole new information development with AI, which is repeatedly telling us that many of the jobs children will one day hold don't yet even exist. So I think perhaps what matters increasingly is not just retrieval of information for school, but maybe it's about adaptability, collaboration, emotional regulation, and critical thinking. Since the pandemic, we have seen, because there's a demand, a real growth in some alternative and specialist provisions. And I think there's also a renewed interest in what's called Democratic schooling. And I think these settings sit somewhere between mainstream and home education because this is where student voice and shared decision-making are built into the structure rather than added on later. When mainstream systems can't adapt quickly enough, alternatives do start to grow. So I think this is what this research is telling us. If families feel they must leave to access flexibility, then flexibility isn't evenly distributed. And then this becomes not just a pedagogical question, but an equity one. Because however we answer the question of what education is for, we're also deciding who it currently works well for and who it doesn't. So just a final slide. What began as a study about home education definitely shifted for me, and it became less about the mechanics of leaving school and more about what families were trying to move toward. And while the ideal of child-centred approach for encouraging autonomy encounters a lot of challenges within mainstream education, I do think that Lundy's model offers four simple but very powerful principles, of space, voice, audience, and influence. Children need space to express their views. They need support to articulate them. They need adults who genuinely listen. And they need assurance that what they say carries weight. And I really want to emphasise that these aren't abstract ideals. These are design principles. So in this study, unfortunately, children's voices were not directly included. And that matters. But in my day-to-day practise, I'm constantly reminded how easily a child's perspective can be overshadowed by all the louder parts of the system. And so for me, Lundy isn't a checklist. It's more of a compass, and I think it connects to something wider. Perhaps this rise in home education is really not a story about leaving school. I think it may also be a story about family seeking space, voice, audience, and influence for their children. And so maybe the deeper question isn't why are family is leaving. But how do we build systems children don't feel they have to leave? Thank you so much for listening. And thank you so much. What a wonderful question to finish on-- how can we really make a difference? And there have been some very interesting points have come up during your presentation, which perhaps we could look at. I mean, lots of comments about being a brilliant presentation, excellent talk, which is really nice. But a very interesting point that Louise Richards has brought up. She said, as a child psychiatrist, I've been very much aware of the ongoing trend where parents feel compelled due to concerns that their child's SCN needs are being insufficiently addressed. Thank you so much for drawing attention to this. Can I please ask about an additional concern that has been the painfully evident clinically, which is a growing sense of more peer bullying that is both more prevalent but also more severe? This, of course, raises the question why, but raises the question whether this is another driver in why parents may feel driven to deregister their children from mainstream education. So I just wonder whether you've got a comment about that. Yeah, no. Thank you, Louise, for all of your insights. So bullying is one of the main reasons. And I think even historically, if you look at motivations for home education and the research even before the pandemic, I think bullying was probably occupied a bigger space than the current SCN needs is occupying, but it absolutely is part of that thing where parents are prioritising their children's safety and being. I wonder if there's a growing sense of more peer bullying because of social media. I don't know if there is a correlation with it being more-- it's more hidden, I expect. So it's more pernicious. Yes, yes. And Alison [? Saar, ?] who's made a number of contributions-- thank you very much, Alison, for your very interesting comments. And we'll come back to some of the other comments you made. But Alison has mentioned that peer bullying has a new delivery method, social media, and has gone from only school time to 24/7. And she asked the question whether the, quotes, "dopamine" addiction to device use from an early stage means we're in a mess? Perhaps an interesting comment. Very. I mean, this technology is such a problem because it's got some brilliant solutions and it comes with so many terrible problems, too. I mean, if we're thinking about students who can't leave home, but they can learn online and they can interact online, then that's a brilliant lifeline, really. But, yes, I think that the overreliance on being on a screen and hiding behind and away from real people interactions is very worrying, very worrying. And I think there's quite a lot of evidence, isn't there, that peer bullying is also related to ACEs, to Adverse Childhood Experiences, and experiences in the home, which are being reenacted and obviously fueled through social media, but very much with a very powerful driving force, of course. Yes. So I think that is interesting. I mean, Alison [? Saar ?] also draws attention to a text, Hidden Voices Speak, a whole book of children's voices in home education available on Amazon, published last year. So thanks very much for drawing attention to that and giving us the link, which is in the chat. So that's very helpful. Yes. And Fiona Lewis mentions, we also meet a lot of families who are really struggling. They feel they've got no option to make the decision to deregister, often encouraged by schools themselves, but are still trying to manage work, and homes, and financial difficulties. I think those balances are very important. Have you any comments about those issues? Yes, I mean, I didn't go into it, but every single mother that I spoke had to sacrifice a lot, really, to restructure their lives to enable them to be at home with their child. One was working in a think tank, social policy, and was taking on shifts at Tesco's basically in the evenings so that she could be with him during the day. I mean, she was genuinely happy to do it. But I think the lack of support provision and the fact that even professionals like myself generally, unless a child has an EHCP, a family who's now on the roll as an elective home educated will not get access to psychologists. They're no longer in the system. And, yes, schools encourage them to do it, but they're not sending them home with a specialist teacher to help them design a curriculum and to figure out how their child is going to best learn. And that's partly why I was also very motivated to write this because I just feel that, yeah, there's so-- home educating families are by default marginalised. And I think the women who I met were happy to have that space. And they probably put positive spins on some elements. But I don't want it to come across as not recognising that for the majority of families, I think the decision to move into home education is preceded by a very long period of distress and confusion and really just feeling quite helpless and not-- I mean, I'm on some Facebook groups that have allowed me to be there as a non-home educator. It's quite hard. The same things all the time. My child hasn't gone back to school for two years and I don't know what to do, but I'm worried that they'll just stay on the couch all day and do nothing. And there's a lot of support from families of leave them be. Let them de-school or let them decompress from their experiences and they will find their way. But I think that's not always guaranteed. And there is a worrying clinical group who are potentially falling into depression and then getting their socialising is online. Nothing's moderated. It's not always entirely safe. I'm not going to pretend that I think it is. But I think, in a way, what are they to do when it's not working at school either? So most of my cases are about at risk of permanent exclusion. And the number of times I've desperately tried to hold meetings that bring families and staff together, staff listen to me, but they don't have the capacity to hear what it means to build a relationship and to care about child because they're not feeling cared for, and they're fed up, and they think they're going to quit the next day. It's very, very hard and it's quite sad. And I think you're right what you said at the very beginning, Arnon, of maybe we really need a big rethink of what we're designing here. Yes, thank you very much. And Alison [? Saar ?] also makes a similar point. Her colleague, Joe Merritt at Exeter University say every piece of research says the same thing. They listen, but they refuse to change the system and acknowledge that the current school model is a failure. She also mentions that flexi-schooling is really tricky to navigate. And she runs a support group for parents who want to flexi. And I think it's interesting the whole issue of supporting parents in those contexts. Yes, yes. And it's so important that there are people who are recognising that and are able to support. I mean, such as Naomi as well. You said Alison. She's very much, yeah, recognise that families just really do need the support because they're not getting it necessarily from places that other families-- if you go to school, you might have more access. If you behave in a certain way-- if you fit in, you'll get the access somehow, or if you fight and fight for an EHCP. And then they can get an EHCP and then things aren't being necessarily as difficult. I'm not blaming. I really want to caveat that I'm not blaming anyone in particular. And the EHCP doesn't guarantee any protection from some of the environmental difficulties that abound for some of these children. Yes, I think that one of the questions that came up from Cassie Goldman wondered whether the numbers include school refusers who may not cooperate with HE. Did the numbers-- sorry. I can't find the question. What was the question? It's at 17:31 in the chat. Do the numbers include school refusers who may not cooperate? Yeah, so numbers is a tricky one. With home education. Yes, that's the Department For Education who collects that data. There are home ed advocacy groups that completely refute all of the data that the DFE publishes. And if you go down a big dark hole around this, you can get really tied up in what the actual numbers are. I would assume that would probably include-- yeah, the kids who are not attending school. No, I don't know. I think if we're talking about home education, it means that you have actually deregistered and you're no longer on roll at school. I do think that that's the numbers that they are looking at. Yeah. It will be fudged. We don't know the stories behind all those numbers is the truth. And I think that comes up with children missing in education. There's a lot of worry about things not being clear around this. And I think that's why there's such a pressure for an official register. Yes. So Charlotte Watson is a student manager for year. Seven in a private school. She's dealt with a few cases of children being withdrawn. And I'm interested in why it happens. And I think you've given some very interesting ideas about that. And what can we do to support parents in making this decision? Which I think is a very interesting point to raise. And I just wonder whether you've got a view about that. I'm biassed. So if I have a family who is talking about it and considering it and they start perhaps justifying it, I'm very open and I'm like, you don't need to qualify it to me at all. I really understand. And let's think about how this might work for you and how it could be positive. But I think it really then depends on people's areas of knowledge. I feel quite confident in supporting families now who are mentioning the possibility of that. I don't ever put it onto them because it might be said in a moment of real frustration. It's usually through an EHCP application and their kid hasn't actually been in school for maybe two-- maybe hasn't even left home for two or three years. And they're just like, should I just not change this all up? So I think it's about listening and creating the space to think about it. But I think what I was trying to say at the end was that there is a demand and there is a response. Alternatives are opening up. And at the moment, these are pockets. We're not joining up on what those other provisions are providing. And sometimes a parent can state it in an EHCP. And if they win it, their tribunal, they will get send their child to this-- I mean, I was reading about a wonderful new college in Somerset. It's called Level Up. And essentially, it's for autistic children who really enjoy working through computers. And all of their learning is gamified and problem-based and it's interest-led. And here is a boy who doesn't want to leave the house, but he really wants to try this school out. And the parents will get it if they're lucky if they will fight for it. But it's not available everywhere. But I think we need to be really thinking and looking outside now for these more creative solutions and inviting that, and equally with home education, centralising it so it's not on the fringes. And it's really hard to do because even in my work in the local authority, we don't talk about home educating families. They don't come into our remit. I mean, I do know that in Camden there's a very good-- I know the officer. And he genuinely has a good relationship with families. But I know that's not always the case in different local authorities. So it's a hard question to answer because it echoes the slipperiness of the whole population of access with home educating families anyway and people thinking to turn because I'm not sure they would necessarily also always come to us to ask about that. I think Dawn Renfrew is asking-- she appreciates that the presentation isn't about longer-term outcomes. But is there any evidence about the longer-term outcomes? And I think that's a very interesting question and very important because, obviously, issues of quality of education and the broad breadth of educational opportunities at home and so on. And I don't know whether there's any long-term follow-ups at the moment available. There are. A lot of it is coming out of America. The US has the biggest-- and Australia has-- Australia, yes. I mean, I would say that, in some ways, home education research is quite partisan. So whilst a lot of it is very heavily landing on, yes, outcomes are better. I mean, if you look it up, that's what you'll find generally. I think you've got to look at what's being reported. And I'm not saying it's not better. I think for those families, if it gets them where they want to be and it does that in a happy way, then it's better. I don't know that we can measure eight GCSEs taken in a school versus six more specialist interests taken-- I think it's very hard to actually put them together and measure them like for like. I think for as many positive outcomes, there are real difficulties because parents are also taking on the expense of having to pay for examinations if you're going to go down A levels. Really, it's getting a higher level. And that costs a lot. So I think some families at some point maybe don't carry on with that path. And I think that's where actually you're disadvantaged as a home educator because it is all on you. And there really aren't systems in existence-- not government systems anyway that are going to help with that. I think, in Australia, because it's got a very big rural population, I think there's a better system, isn't there, in terms of available good quality educational material online so that, in a sense, it becomes much more possible in those contexts if resources are available? I mean, what I have read today that I hadn't read before, which I think I shared with you on at the beginning, the trauma-informed approaches are showing, though, in the studies that they reduce 90% of reduction in exclusions. So I think if we're maybe now moving away from home education into thinking about the redesign of those spaces, a trauma-informed setting is definitely changing outcomes, yeah, within mainstream-- well, certainly in reducing exclusions. And I think, yeah, exclusions remain a really worrying thing. It's an interesting point that Rebecca has mentioned. In America, it's interesting that the whole Charlie Kirk Trump pressure on a return to home education almost being recommended as a separate conversation. It's a huge impact on the ability of both parents to be able to work and may have a moving part of AI creating a job shortage in the new future. So interesting changes of emphasis. Yeah, I mean, I think in the states, I think it's running through communities, this rise in home ed right now. Yes, yes. So I think there's a lot of information going to come up. Interesting that your email has been passed to Joe at Exeter about to open a research centre for home education. Oh, thank you. That's amazing. Thank you, Allison. [INAUDIBLE] Girl Guides. That's brilliant, OK. Which is really very interesting. Yeah, and again, Sussex, Devon, Dorset, much bigger communities of home educating families I think, again, outside of-- and a reliance on the online resources, I think that's the fact that you do have access to that and does make it a lot easier. And you don't have to pay for-- you can get BBC website. There are a lot of free things out there I think parents have discovered. And they share that they share these resources with one another. Yes. I noticed that Rebecca has also commented about the way that the schools don't really invest the monies to help children and young people on ECHCPs. But that's another very concerning issue, obviously, and complicated. I think a statement like that could very possibly be a reason why a family would then say, well, where else can we go? There's really nowhere else to go if the school is not implementing it. We've got the paper, other than trialling all different settings potentially. And I think you'll find that a lot of the families with SCN who have moved into home educating have hit this point. They might have the EHCP, but it's not proving-- Helpful. Yeah, meaningfully helpful, yeah. Last point. I think Louise Richards mentions to be controversial possible that education system has become more focused on achievement. Is it possible that it is a contributing factor to a rise in peer bullying, as children as a whole are made to feel increasingly that in some way they're not good enough and don't meet our idealised perfectionist grades? So that becomes a-- Very interesting, --significant area of conflict. I think that's an interesting point. I mean, I think the attainment pressures are generally not very healthy. I do think. No, they're enormous, aren't they? Yes, we all lived with that and understand it. Well, I think we've looked at-- I hope we've raised most of the points that people-- thank you very much for-- I also want to say there are some wonderful schools that are fully aware of this and really actively are trying. And we have to recognise that they do exist. And this isn't about, yeah, tarnishing all of education with the same brush. But, yeah, it just would be hopeful to see that there can be some more progressive thinking around policy around what we think education is for, is that that whole attainment, the go-govian principles are really not aligning with what our children need for today's world and for their futures. Absolutely. Last point. Charlotte Wotton is saying, thank you for a very interesting and thought provoking presentation. And has it been published as yet? I need to cut it right down in order to publish it. I hope you will because I think it's been such interesting issues that you've raised. Well, folks, I think that we should finish at this point. And I hope everybody noted ACAMH request to give some feedback, please, because I think it's important that we get some ideas about how people feel about the seminars we're doing. Our very recently published a newsletter. We're asking colleagues to tell us whether the request to shorten the newsletter, fewer, rather more focused areas to look at is helpful. So please let us know. So I think Dahlia has asked, take a few moments to give your feedback, and there's a point on the chat at 18:32, where Dalia is both thanking Tami for a very informative and fascinating talk. And thanks to myself. Thank you. It's a joy to chair, and share, and hear these fascinating and interesting developments. And Dahlia has asked people to respond to the survey. So thank you very much. The recording will be available. And I'm sure there will be many others who will watch the recording who were unable to tune in this evening. So, Tami, thank you very much. Thank you, Arnon. Thank you very much for having me. Really very interesting. And thanks, everybody, for contributing. And Dahlia has also announced the conference we're organising on the 30th of September, adversity protection and prevention. We're looking at a broad view about what's helpful and the balance between both adversity and what are the factors which mitigate it, because this is the world we're in at the moment. So thank you all very much indeed and look forward to seeing you next month at our next seminar. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Arnon. Cheers. [MUSIC PLAYING]