NOW GENERATION
Practical school refusal training for schools
Evidence-informed professional development for school teams supporting persistent non-attendance, school avoidance and emotionally based school avoidance.
Face-to-face training, professional development, speaking and consulting with Dr Lynette Maguire across the Gold Coast, Brisbane and South East Queensland. Interstate enquiries are welcome.
When a student stops attending, the response matters
Persistent non-attendance is rarely solved by pressure alone. The same behaviour can arise for very different reasons, and a response that helps one student can make things harder for another.
When a student stops attending, knowing what not to do can matter as much as knowing what to do.
Now Generation helps school teams move from attendance crisis to a coordinated re-engagement plan.
“The interaction and application to real life situations was helpful and the workshops were structured and comprehensive.”
School staff member
Feedback from Now Generation school refusal professional development.
Understand before you intervene
When a student stops attending, the first question is often, “How do we get them back?” We start one step earlier:
What is getting in the way of this student participating in education, and what can we change?
Our approach helps school teams move through four practical stages: NOTICE → UNDERSTAND → ACT → REVIEW. It brings together student, family and school perspectives, considers barriers in both the learner and the environment, and turns that understanding into realistic next steps.
FLAGSHIP TRAINING
Two-Day School Refusal & Re-engagement Training
New for 2026: a substantially redesigned two-day program that brings current evidence on attendance, neurodivergence, student voice, environmental barriers, family collaboration, reasonable adjustments and gradual re-engagement into one practical school decision-making method. It is designed as a whole-school re-engagement system, not just a collection of strategies for individual students.
Day 1: Understand and formulate
Recognise patterns, gather meaningful information, hear student and family perspectives, identify school and environmental barriers, and develop a working formulation before deciding what to do.
Day 2: Respond and re-engage
Choose appropriate adjustments, plan gradual re-engagement, coordinate school-family-professional responses, manage setbacks and turn formulation into an actionable next step.
Designed for: principals and deputies, guidance officers, heads of student services and wellbeing, inclusion staff, school psychologists and counsellors, attendance teams, and teachers supporting persistent non-attendance.
What school teams leave with
A shared language
A consistent way to talk about attendance difficulty without reducing it to motivation, behaviour or anxiety alone.
A repeatable method
A structured process that can be used for one student, an attendance or wellbeing caseload, or as a consistent whole-school response to persistent non-attendance.
Practical tools
Case-based practice and structured implementation tools to support real school decision-making.
Flexible delivery for schools and networks
Choose from two-day single-school training, scheduled Gold Coast open workshops, selected live online professional-development workshops, network or cluster training, shorter professional development and speaking, or consulting for more specific implementation needs. Whole-school and network training can be delivered on site or live online.
Gold Coast · Brisbane · South East Queensland
Interstate enquiries welcome.
Practical. Evidence-informed. Built for real school decisions.
Dr Lynette Maguire brings together research, extensive university teaching experience and applied work in school refusal, youth mental health, neurodiversity and education.
Parents and carers looking for direct family support? School Refusal Recovery provides the parent-facing program and resources.