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The educational attainment of 100 school-phobic youngsters was compared to that of 100 other psychiatric patients, using the reading quotient as the main measure. Age and IQ were allowed for. RQs were, on average, higher in the school phobic group than in the other subjects, except in a small number of younger children of high IQ. Additional comparisons with another group of psychiatric patients and with the general population, using regression equations, failed to provide any evidence of poor educational attainment in school phobia.

School-phobic youngsters have sometimes been described as wilful and stubborn in the family situation (Hersov, 1960), and this tendency has been invoked to explain the particular occurrence of school phobia in early adolescence (Leventhal and Sills, 1964). The emotional upset shown by these young people when faced with the prospect of going to school (Berg, Nichols and Pritchard, 1969), may occasionally appear to be more in the nature of anger, defiance and temper than either fearfulness or misery (Smith, 1970). The fact that in the general population dislike of school is reflected in actual absence only during the secondary school years (Mitchell and Shepherd, 1967) supports the view that assertiveness, which presumably becomes more effective as the child reaches the teens, plays some part in school refusal.