Conformity is Not Resilience

The Normalization of School Suffering

The Settling Mindset

“It’s fine, I guess. It’s good for a local state school.”

“All in all, she seems to be doing fine. Secondary school is just hard, isn’t it?”

“From our perspective, your son is doing fine in all his classes.”

As parents, we settle. In all of my conversations with parents in the UK about what life is like for their child in secondary school, I don’t hear any excitement or joy. No one responds, “It’s great!”

For many, the status quo is taken as a given—children have to go to secondary school, there’s an adjustment period to get through, and, although it doesn’t work for some, for most, it’s fine.

What About Children Who Aren’t Fine?

I also spend a lot of time working with families whose children aren’t fine. Often these are families with children labelled as EBSAs (Emotionally-Based School Avoiders). Children with EHCPs (Educational Health Care Plans). SEND kids. Children with ASD, ADHD, ODD. All the children reduced to acronyms.

As of January 2024, approximately 1.7 million school pupils in England were identified with SEND, representing 18% of all pupils. And the number of students with EHCPs has risen by 140% since 2015. Many of these children are dropping out of school in droves, failed by a system that can’t account for diversity, and forced into home education and alternative provisions.

But there are just as many children who are staying in school who aren’t okay. I’d argue the majority of children aren’t fine. I don’t think anyone goes through secondary school unscathed. (I explore this further in: What We Learn in School.)

As a parent of a neurodiverse child who is thriving in primary school, I’ve already been advised by other parents to begin the EHCP process now no matter how successful he currently is—because he’ll need it for secondary. Many families pursue diagnoses not because they want labels, but because they serve as shields against the worst aspects of school.

The “Resilience” Myth

One of the most common (and bleakest) things I hear from parents is:

“Year 7 was really hard. I had to force her out of the house crying every day. But she’s doing much better now in Year 8.”

By “better,” what they mean is that their child is doing fine. They still don’t enjoy school, they still don’t want to go, but they’ve made some friends and they’ve adjusted. But what is the cost of that adjustment?

There’s a toxic assumption that this process builds resilience. That suffering through school makes children tougher. You’ll hear people say:

“We went through the same school system, and it didn’t kill us.”

But conformity is not resilience. Adjusting to school often means learning:

• to not speak up

• to avoid getting in trouble

• to dress like everyone else

• to bully others to protect your status

• to hide emotions

• to suppress individuality

• to deny your dreams and longings

• to be submissive, indirect, and polite

These are lessons that take a lifetime to unlearn.

The Pressure to Conform

Secondary schools are pressure cookers of conformity and compliance, at a developmental stage (adolescence) where these pressures have the most damaging impact. And yet, instead of alleviating the pressure, schools add more fuel to the fire.

Here is just a small list of what today’s teenagers are navigating:

• Academic Pressures: High-stakes exams (GCSEs, A-Levels), constant assessment, heavy workloads, and a culture of comparison.

• Social Pressures: Bullying (including online), friendship struggles, beauty standards, gender expectations, and relationships.

• School Environment Pressures: Rigid behavior policies, authoritarian cultures, strict uniform rules, and overcrowded classrooms.

• Mental Health & Well-being Struggles: Lack of support, school avoidance, pressure to “mask” struggles, reduced outdoor time, increased screen time.

• Pressures on Neurodiverse Students: Sensory overload, lack of accommodations, stigma, underfunded support.

• Parental & Societal Expectations: Pressure to achieve, cultural and family expectations, anxiety about the future.

• Pressures on Teachers That Impact Students: Overworked staff, data-driven teaching, lack of flexibility.

• Economic & Political Anxiety: Climate crisis, cost of living crisis, war, political division, violence.

• Pressures on Marginalized Students: Racism, discrimination, code-switching, microaggressions, curriculum erasure.

Given all this, is it any wonder there’s a teenage mental health crisis?

In 2023, NHS statistics revealed that 20.3% of children aged 8 to 16 in England had a probable mental disorder—a stark increase from 12.5% in 2017. A 2024 survey found that nearly 30% of secondary pupils avoid school due to anxiety. And then the correlations between school pressures and youth suicide rates, especially during exam season, are particularly harrowing.

These are not isolated cases; they point to a systemic problem.

Redefining Resilience Through Non-Conformity

I would argue that true resilience exists in non-conformity. It’s not about coping with harmful conditions, it’s about refusing to accept them. It’s about protest, resistance, and questioning systems that don’t serve us. Not just “keeping calm and carrying on.”

Yet, there’s a bizarre narrative that young people today are too fragile. The idea persists that:

“The younger generation is just less mentally tough than ours. They just need to get on with it.”

People claim campus protests are a sign of oversensitivity. That rising mental health crises result from overprotective parents. That children avoiding school are just snowflakes. That today’s teenagers and their parents are "soft."

But in my mind, real fragility is the inability to tolerate change. The refusal to engage with challenging ideas.

It takes bravery:

• To be a family who chooses a different path.

• To be a teenager who opts out.

• To be a student who speaks up.

• To be an educator who tries something different.

Real weakness lies in clinging to the status quo.

A System That Keeps Parents in the Dark

For most parents secondary school is a black box. They have no real idea what their child is experiencing at school. This is part of what informs the attitude above. If you don’t know better, it seems like they’re fine.

This is, in many ways, by design. Schools keep families at a distance, arguing that this fosters independence. Although, I think that this trend in schools is less rooted in preparing children for adulthood, and more in convenience and avoidance of discomfort. Most teachers and leaders avoid bringing parents in because they fear the difficulty of managing them. And so they build firewalls to keep parents out.

Step one is awareness. If parents better understood what was happening in schools, they could be part of a movement for change. They could start recognizing that things aren’t fine.

So, What Now?

We need to stop settling for fine. We need to reimagine secondary school not as a survival experience, but as an environment that fosters growth, curiosity, and joy.

That means:

✅ Schools that listen to students and parents.
✅ Policies that support mental health and neurodiversity.
✅ Education that values more than just compliance and exam scores.
✅ A system that nurtures individualism, not conformity.

Because if the best we can say about secondary school is "it’s fine", then it’s already failing our children.

Learn more about how we actively foster resilient non-conformity at the Lumiar School here.