Family Early Help
What is Emotionally Based School Avoidance?
Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA) is a broad term used to describe children and young people who have difficulty attending school because of emotional factors, often resulting in prolonged absences from school.
EBSA helps give us a different frame to think about 'when school doesn't feel like a safe place' rather than simply thinking of it as 'refusing school'.
A clear distinction is made between those that are absent from school due to truanting and those that are absent from school because of specific emotional distress that they experience around attending school (although arguably we should always consider the emotional reasons that might drive 'truanting').
COVID will of course have increased anxiety about returning to school for some children and parents. Equally, many children and young people were experiencing EBSA before COVID.
Here are the slides from our EBSA webinar on 10 September:
What About Emotional Literacy?
Emotional Literacy is described as the building block for emotional intelligence: "let us sort out all those feelings, name them, and begin to understand their causes and effects - to put feelings into words so those feelings can be understood".
In order to help a child experiencing EBSA, we will need to feel confident to support them to name their feelings. If we can accurately name feelings, we can work on the right strategy to cope with or manage them.
Using emotional literacy tools like a feelings wheel can be a helpful supplement to the EBSA push and pull factors. This can help really pinpoint the feelings the child has about school (e.g. "what feelings do you have about school?" "when do you have those feelings?" "can you remember a time when you had a different feeling about school - can you name that feeling? what was different then?").
You could also ask"what physical sensations do you have when you feel this e.g. foot tapping, hiding, lump in my throat, tired, hot etc)", so you can connect with the childs lived experience of the feeling, and so they can connect the feeling with the physical sensation in their body.
Here is an example of a feelings wheel which you can use to think about naming feelings (you can find other tools in the Remote Direct Work Kit Bag):
You can read more about emotional literacy here
https://www.habitsforwellbeing.com/what-is-emotional-literacy/
Pushing Away and Pulling Towards School - A Tool To Use
Here is the Push and Pull Factors template to help you think through what factors might be pulling a child towards or pushing them away from school
What Place or Building Does Feel Safe for the Child?
To supplement the push and pull factors, you might also do a community genogram to think about ALL of the places that a child goes to or visits regularly.
You can use the community genogram to reflect on where a child feels emotionally or physically safe and secure, and where they don't. This can help make sense of why school particularly may not be feeling physically or emotionally safe for the child, and what you could learn from a place that does feel safe.
Who Could Help Me Think About EBSA for a Child I'm Working with?
Our friends in educational psychology (Gemma Atkinson, Colin Chance and Cathleen Halligan) can all support you to think through how to approach EBSA, and reflect on the push and pull factors.
Remember to consider whether school is a physically safe place (e.g. is there a possibility the child is being assaulted or in physical danger in or around school) - this is always an important question to hold in mind.
Where Can I Find Out More About EBSA?
Here is Camden's EBSA Guidance
And here is a link to West Sussex Council who have done a lot of development work on EBSA
https://westsussex.local-offer.org/information_pages/474-what-is-emotionally-based-school-avoidance