- I'm Lucy Clark. I'm a journalist. I've been a journalist since I was 17, and, 50 now, and I'm a senior editor with The Guardian, Australia, and I'm the mother of three children. 
My daughter failed school, you know, everything, which was what, you know, led to the title of my book, 'cause I wrote this article, My Daughter, My Beautiful Failure on the day she had finished her HSC. 
Around year 10, things started going a little bit pear-shaped with her starting to refuse going to school, opting out of a lot of activities, finding it hard to hand in work, do anything, really, that was expected. 
It was a struggle to get her there every day, and it was important to her to finish though. I mean she really wanted to finish school because she said that feeling like a loser would be so much worse. 
There were no warning signs. It's kind of this slow creep that you don't, there's no mark to it. There's no beginning point. It kind of makes it difficult to say to people, "Watch out for this," or "Watch out for that." 
I just remember sort of suddenly being in the deputy principal's office crying, trying to work out what was going wrong. And a lot of time was spent, you know, trying to get her back on that track. 
And, looking back, I wish, much earlier that I'd thought, and to my shame, I wish I'd thought that my daughter is actually on another track, and I respect that track, and I want to support that track. 
But when you're in it, it feels difficult, and you've gotta, you've gotta try and get them back on the track that everyone says they should be on. 
She was pretty much in fight-or-flight mode the whole time, and was in a really high state of anxiety. The points at which it was clear her mental health was suffering, my husband and I would say, you know, "Nothing's worth this." "This is obviously really hard for you." "It's only school." "You can drop out." "You don't have to be there." "You can go back to school at any stage in your life."
Get in there early. Make time to be there. You know, everyone's very busy, and it's really hard to find the time, but you have to. I mean, it's a priority, and also, your child needs to feel like you're in their corner, and you're finding the person in the school who is in her corner in the school. 
Kids need to feel like they matter, and they need to feel like that they've got support, both in the home and in the schools, so then you need to identify who that person is in the school, and get in there and be in there as much as you can. 
It's a simple but hard thing to do for a lot of parents and that is just take the pressure off at home. They're getting it at school. Home needs to be a haven. They need to come home, and feel that it's not just a continuation of the pressure they've been getting all day. 
Shift the conversation about their education. Don't talk about what their grades are, what they're getting, and where they're coming in the class. Talk about what they're enjoying in their learning, what they want to learn more about tomorrow, what sort of ideas that they're really engaged in at school. So they get a sense that their education is something interesting to be discussed, rather than just a race to be run.