Your voices: heard - The EBSA Toolkit
We spoke to Dr Helen Cox, principal educational psychologist at South Gloucestershire Council about the Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA) Toolkit and its aim of providing schools with the resources to enable earlier intervention
The knock-on effects of Covid-19 on children and young people’s education are still a challenge that families and education settings are battling with today. One being the issue around attendance, and more specifically, children and young people with difficulty attending school due to mental health - also known as Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA).
In views and concerns raised by parent carers in our SGPC community at events, engagement sessions and through attendance surveys that we’ve conducted, EBSA was highlighted as an issue that we needed to feedback to the Local Authority as a matter of great importance.
In response to this, a meeting was set up by Dr Helen Cox, principal educational psychologist, to discuss a new course of action. She says: “EBSA is a huge priority. At the moment we still don’t have a true picture of the numbers of children affected by EBSA. EBSA is a very wide concept that includes being late in the morning due to difficulties with separation from parents, children being in school but not being able to get into the classroom and children not attending any setting for prolonged periods of time. The numbers have definitely been exasperated since Covid, both locally and nationally.”
The evidence of increasing numbers came from the parent carer voices in our forum, alongside local data of attendance in children and young people with SEND; increased referrals to other services because of school avoidance; and a collaborative research project undertaken by the University of Bristol.
Helen says: “We heard all about the experiences and challenges of EBSA from parents and carers, particularly in regards to not feeling listened to early enough or even blamed, so we put together an EBSA working group consisting of parent carer forums and professionals from health, social care, education settings to see what we could do.
“We weren’t getting early help right; not all schools were confident in their strategy, and we didn’t have a centralised approach. So, the educational psychologists started working on an EBSA Toolkit for schools to enable prevention, early identification, and intervention – giving schools the resources to map support around individuals.”
The toolkit itself, published earlier this year, is a 59-page document which includes sections on what EBSA is, what schools can do to support children and looks at various stages of early intervention and strategies, e.g. if a child is consistently late, can reasonable adjustments be made? It also discusses risk and resilience and push and pull factors, e.g. bullying, transport, and bereavement, and takes a whole school approach for intervention and prevention.
Before being presented to schools, it was first sent to focus groups and parent carer forums to be reviewed. “We really wanted to make sure the toolkit aligned to what parents and carers were telling us about their experiences, and home and school working together in a flexible child-centered way is essential,” says Helen. Following this consultation period, schools were then trained on the EBSA Toolkit and how to work with parents, in response to parent carers saying that they felt blamed for their child’s attendance difficulties. Another workshop held with schools addressed the link with EBSA and neurodiversity, and training on the toolkit is planned for all staff who work in education and healthcare before the end of the year, with annual training being held thereafter for the benefit of new staff and to reinforce the EBSA Toolkit focus.
Following the launch of the toolkit, a triage approach to support all children with attendance challenges including EBSA is due to be started imminently, where education welfare officers will have strategic meetings with schools and will take away a referral list to a triage meeting, where it will then be decided on the best support option. One of these is a family link worker, who will work with the family for up to six months, supporting the family with attendance depending on their needs. For example, supporting them with advice and signposting or attending meetings with the family and the school. Helen says: “We are very much taking a key working approach which is what we’ve been missing so far. This is going to change the way that schools work with parents. It’s all about being flexible, making reasonable adjustments and working a lot more joined up to support this.”
And it is the parent carer contributions which Helen credits as being the driving force for the EBSA Toolkit. “The parent carer contributions have directly shaped the toolkit and we are grateful for the feedback of their experiences,” says Helen. “Parents are the experts when it comes to their children, so we have very much taken a child-led approach. We want parent carers to know their voices are being heard and hopefully, with the EBSA Toolkit in place, we can provide some reassurance that there’s a plan in place for children in schools.”
You can find a copy of the EBSA toolkit on the South Glos Way Inclusion Toolkit here.