Bristol Leads The Way With New Language Around EBSA

Emotionally Based School Avoidance will finally be getting a new name and dedicated policy

Bristol will be ditching old fashioned and controversial language around the difficulties children and young people experience with attending school.

School avoidance, school refusal, school anxiety, anxiety based school avoidance and more recently, emotionally based school avoidance will be replaced in Bristol with DASCA (difficulty accessing school or college due to anxiety or feeling unsafe in the environment).

It’s a major breakthrough by Bristol Parent Carer Forum (BPCF), who have been working on changing the term to move away from blaming those affected and looking at the reasons why.

BPCF says that “language matters” and by moving away from older terms, It is “describing a situation, not labelling a child.”

Until now, there has been no city-wide policy leaving families floundering unsupported. The DASCA approach means that attendance is not the first thing that needs addressing. It indicates that the child or young person is experiencing unmet needs, usually, though not always relating to Special Educational Needs and Disabilites (SEND).

BPCF says that DASCA is “not about bad behaviour, poor parenting, or a lack of effort. It is not a diagnosis. It is a way of understanding that something in the environment is not working for the child right now.”

The forum says that “It means that school or college currently feels too overwhelming, frightening, or unsafe for a child or young person to manage. This might be because of anxiety, sensory overload, social pressures, changes, or needs that are not yet fully understood or supported.”

The revelation came out Children and Young People Policy Committee this week in one of Bristol City Council’s update papers.

The paper SEND and Alternative Provision Transformation Programme progress report provides updates on Bristol City Council’s progress towards improving SEND and the Inclusion Delivery Plan. It runs alongside the SEND transformation work which had previously been reported as part of the Safety Valve programme.

The papers stated an ‘Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA) mapping workshop had been held to identify gaps and inform a more coordinated strategic response.’

Following a verbal update to the committee, Green Councillor Shona Jemphrey of Lawrence Hill Ward asked: “It talks about a mapping workshop being held to identify gaps and talk about more strategic response. Can someone give a bit more detail about that and what the next steps are for that?”

Director of Education and Skills, Vik Verma said: “We are working with the ICB (Integrated care board). We commissioned Barnardo’s to meet with a group of young people to talk about losing learning.

“What they described was themes around behaviour policies in schools, feeling belonging in schools, trusted adults being absolutely key in terms of the support they receive.

“In fact there is a really helpful video which is on YouTube which I’ll share around the link for, which summarises the young people speaking to camera describing their experiences.

“We’ve been meeting across Bristol, North Somerset, South Glos with the ICB and have turned that into an action plan which will actually form part of our reform plan and be tracked through that so it’s now embedded in our work in that way.

“We will also in September be launching a new policy around Emotionally Based School Avoidance which we will likely rename from EBSA because we think the term potentially is unhelpful and calling it more difficulty attending school as opposed to emotion based school avoidance.

“Whilst it is the same cohort actually thinking about what are those difficulties and how can we unblock those? So that will launch in September as well along side that.”

Jemphrey said: “That sounds like an interesting shift from more like hopefully away from a blaming attitude of blaming the children and parents for the avoidance and looking at the difficulties.

For more information about DASCA and BPCF: https://www.bristolparentcarers.org.uk/difficulty-accessing-education/

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