
Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA) is a complex and challenging issue that affects many students, causing them to resist attending school due to emotional distress. As school staff, it’s crucial to understand EBSA and how we can support these students to ensure their emotional well-being and academic success. In this blog post, we will delve into what EBSA is, its potential causes, and practical strategies to help students overcome it.
There is no single underlying cause of EBSA. Instead, we tend to see a complex web of risk factors, triggering events and maintaining factors.
Kearney and Spear (2012) have shown that avoiding school often serves one or more of these four main functions for the young person:
1. To avoid uncomfortable feelings brought on by attending school, such as anxiety or low mood.
2. To avoid situations that might be stressful, such as academic demands, social pressures and aspects of the school environment.
3. To reduce separation anxiety or to gain attention from significant others, such as parents or other family members.
4. To pursue tangible reinforcers outside of school, such as shopping or playing computer games during school time.
Several risk and resilience factors determine whether the young person experiences EBSA. These can also be understood as pull and push factors. For example, common risk factors include anxiety, bullying, academic pressure, family issues, and health concerns. Understanding how to identify these risk factors and develop resilience is vital in supporting young people to overcome their EBSA. You can learn more about how to do this in practice in our EBSA – How to Help online training.
“School refusal occurs when stress exceeds support, when risks are greater than resilience and when ‘pull’ factors that promote school non-attendance overcome the ‘push’ factors that encourage attendance” (Thambirajah et al., 2008: p. 33).
Understanding individual needs
Despite what we know about the common causes of EBSA, each young person has a unique story and set of circumstances. It is, therefore, essential to get to know the young person and their family (this may need to happen online if they are not attending school). We recommend a member of the school staff with good active listening skills take time to gather the young person’s views through activities such as:
Once we have explored the young person’s perspectives and unique situation and ensured their and their families’ voices have been heard, we can begin collaborative intervention planning.
Several critical factors have been shown to relate to successful EBSA intervention. These include (Baker & Bishop, 2015):
We have developed a highly practical training session aimed at helping you develop and deliver an effective, personalised intervention plan for students who struggle with EBSA.
To learn more, see our online course: EBSA – How to Help.
Written by Dr Alicja Jedrzejewska – Educational and Child Psychologist
We pride ourselves on delivering training content and supervision supported by evidence, research and scientific principles.