On 20 May 2026, ACAMH will host Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA) in Practice: Evidence, Complexity, and Recovery-Oriented Approaches.
We caught up with two of the presenters – Professor Caroline Bond, a former teacher and educational psychologist who is placement lead for the Doctorate in Educational Psychology programme at the University of Manchester, and Jerricah Holder, a child and educational psychologist with over 10 years’ experience specialising in emotionally based school avoidance – about the topic itself, their careers, and their hopes for the event.
How did you come to specialise and focus on this area?
Caroline: As an educational psychologist I was working with neurodivergent young people who had significant difficulties attending school and were, in some cases, stuck in their bedrooms. Nobody was quite sure how to support them to meaningfully re-engage with education, and I felt motivated to find solutions.
Since COVID, the issue has attracted considerably more attention. That is broadly welcome, although it also brings complications, not least around how we define and talk about the problem.
Jerricah: My passion really came from hearing the stories of children and families and wanting to develop strategies and models that worked in the real world – and sometimes hearing the conflicts between models presented in research and how they were actually experienced on the ground. That led me to develop my own therapeutic models and courses around emotion-based school avoidance, working in collaboration with children and families and drawing on the growing body of research of the last five years.
On the definition point, the event title uses ‘Emotionally Based School Avoidance’, but Caroline your session specifically calls the issue ‘school attendance’ more broadly. Why is that?
Caroline: This was deliberate, and I think it matters. EBSA – emotionally based school avoidance – describes a specific subgroup: young people whose difficulties attending school are primarily anxiety-driven.
But school attendance difficulties are broader than that. Young people themselves have said: it was not anxiety that stopped me going to school, it was bullying. Bullying may have led to anxiety or other issues, but their starting point was different. If we apply the EBSA label too quickly, we risk misrepresenting what is actually going on for that young person, so using ‘school attendance’ as my framing is a way of holding that complexity.
It will be my job in the webinar to give that overall picture around school attendance and set the scene, and although I will also talk about interventions, my colleagues in the next two sessions will go into more detail.
What can you tell us about the overall picture on school attendance – and how has it changed in recent years?
Caroline: A key thing is that less affluent communities consistently show higher rates of absence, and it is rarely one single cause – it is an accumulation of barriers. And it looks very different in different places, for instance in our report looking at the north of England, we give the example of communities with lots of children missing school for dental appointments, or because they couldn’t access timely dental care so needed more extensive treatment.
Dentistry would not be the first thing many practitioners think of, but it speaks to how cumulative disadvantage works, and of the importance of local data. A national trend may look completely different in your community, and responding to the wrong problem helps nobody. But there are significant gaps in the evidence base, nationally and locally. One reason is that the field still struggles to agree on definitions – things like the threshold for what counts as ‘persistent’ absence, or the terms we should use to refer to different groups who struggle to attend.
Jerricah: Building on that, it’s also important to say that the pandemic was a significant catalyst – not because these children didn’t exist before, but because it made attendance difficulties much more visible at a systemic level.
What the pandemic gave us was a body of evidence showing that periods of rest and recovery can actually be protective of children’s longer-term attendance. It really shifted understanding of how we use proactive opportunities for respite and recovery rather than rushing children back into school. Families often describe it as a reset button – time for their child to focus on well-being, rebuild resilience, and re-enter school when ready. Post-pandemic, there’s now stronger support for creativity and flexibility within school systems, rather than forcing attendance at the expense of mental health.
Jerricah, you’ve developed your own model for supporting children at the more severe end of the spectrum – can you tell us about it?
Jerricah: The ‘Moving from Recovery to Rediscovery’ model is a well-being recovery model I developed through my therapeutic work with children and families, seeing families arrive at the decision to withdraw their child from school, led by a desire to care and protect. But once children are out of the school system, we often lose access to the protective factors they had there, and the pathways back become harder to find.
The model supports schools and families to keep working together during the recovery process – because school is an integral part of recovery, even if the child isn’t currently attending. It also supports families to gently find their way out of respite and back into the world. Sometimes we get stuck in that respite stage: naturally, through fear of destabilising the child, things become very protective, which is right initially, but we can stay there too long.
It’s a collaborative, exploratory approach – practitioners, psychologists and school staff learn how to explore it with families and children, planning the journey together. It’s important to say that this is a Tier 3 model, it applies to a relatively small number of children, whose attendance challenges are chronic and persistent and for whom earlier interventions haven’t been successful.
More broadly, what else does the evidence say about effective interventions?
Caroline: The evidence is fairly clear on some things. Early intervention matters enormously: once a young person reaches the more severe end of the attendance spectrum, it becomes considerably harder to turn things around.
Also clear is that punitive approaches are not effective. Fining parents is used in England but not in Scotland, but there is no strong evidence it improves attendance, and where there is a significant anxiety component, it can make things worse.
What does help is curriculum flexibility, joined-up services, and a genuine understanding of the local context.
The framing of the issue has shifted considerably over time: early research tended to see non-attendance through a medical lens, using terms like ‘school phobia’, and that brought certain professionals and certain interventions to the fore. More recently there have been calls to adopt a more holistic view which combines understanding the child level with systemic insights.
Who should attend this event, and what do you want them to take away from it?
Caroline: This will be relevant to a wide range of education professionals, clinicians, others working in the health and care system, researchers, and anyone working in or around schools who wants a more evidence-informed framework for thinking about this issue.
One immediate practical message is simple: make school attendance part of your assessments. Ask not just ‘is this young person attending?’, but ‘how are they engaging with learning?’ A child can be physically present in school and still be looking out of the window, entirely disconnected from what is being taught. Both pieces of information matter.
More broadly, I want CAMHS practitioners to leave with a framework for thinking about attendance across the full range of need, not just the high-complexity end, which is where CAMHS naturally tends to focus.
Jerricah: I hope that attendees will have a greater understanding of why and when recovery models might be applicable – and a clearer sense that this isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. This is for children at the far end of the continuum: those whose challenges are chronic and persistent, and for whom earlier strategies haven’t worked.
I hope this gives attendees a tool for those young people where we often feel a little lost and unsure how to help – and the confidence to work alongside children and families to plan those pathways through recovery and back into the world.
Find more content on school attendance and avoidance, and a range of other topics on ACAMH Learn, our completely free, online learning resource.