Safeguarding and Attendance: Profiling Risk and Resilience

There are more tools and a whole school and family EBSA learning series available at the EdPsychEd website. Access Safeguarding Network’s discounts to EdPsychEd’s materials at the end of this article.

Risk and Resilience: Identifying and prioritising support for children with attendance barriers

Surface level responses to complex problems rarely work. When vulnerable children in your care begin experiencing attendance difficulties, you need a systematic approach to understanding what drives these challenges and where to focus your support most effectively.

Children face differing barriers to attendance: some may struggle with anxiety about peer relationships, others with the unpredictability of their home circumstances, while some experience unmet SEN needs, or perhaps find the sensory environment of school overwhelming. Without a clear framework, it's easy to apply generic solutions that don't address the specific factors affecting each child.

Senior leaders responsible for attendance and the DSL should work closely together to address attendance difficulties and to recognise those who may be at risk of Emotionally Based School Avoidance. Your setting should have a robust approach to attendance, beginning with an assessment of the causal factors. Understanding the risk and resilience underpinning school avoidance is as much a safeguarding task as an attendance approach.

Understanding Push and Pull Factors

The EBSA Risk and Resilience Profiles provide a systematic approach to understanding what makes school attendance more challenging or more manageable for each child. Rather than guessing at interventions, this tool helps you identify the specific "push" factors that make school feel difficult and the "pull" factors that could encourage attendance.

How can we better understand and prioritise what students may need?

By identifying a student's risk and resilience factors we're able to target support and interventions where they are needed most.

This holistic framework helps you see more of the picture, linking the safeguarding concerns you're already aware of to how these interact with school-specific factors to create attendance barriers. Parents and carers are also involved in developing this shared understanding and new areas of need are likely to emerge.

Prioritising Your Support

When resources are stretched, this tool becomes even more crucial. By mapping out risk and resilience factors, you can identify which children need immediate intensive support and which have protective factors that can be strengthened with lighter-touch interventions.

We've found using this in our practice sparks lots of ideas and has given us a platform to develop a prioritised plan of effective support. The profiles help you move beyond crisis response to strategic support planning, ensuring your limited time and resources have maximum impact for the vulnerable children in your care.

How to use the EBSA Risk and Resilience Profiles

The resource includes an in-depth video explaining how to get the most from the EBSA Risk and Resilience Profiles, the forms for parents/carers and professionals, and a profiling tool that creates spider charts to visually present the findings. These forms are not intended to be used directly with students.

ACCESS THE EBSA RISK & RESILIENCE PROFILE RESOURCE PACK

In our next article we develop our approach from understanding the problem of Emotionally Based School Avoidance for a student to practical, evidence-based strategies that make a difference in their lives, including Home, School, and Child-focused strategy grids to plan your intervention.

Safeguarding Network is offering members and blog readers discount codes of up to £100 off EdPsychEd’s School Training resources with our special discount codes.

Individual Staff Training Licence

• £10 off for Members and Non-members - use code EBSA10

Whole School Licence

• £25 off for Non-members - use code EBSA25

• £50 off for Safeguarding Network Members - use code SGN50

Whole School and Family License

• £25 off for Non-members - use code EBSA25

• £100 off for Safeguarding Network Members - use code SGN100

LEARN MORE ABOUT EBSA HORIZONS SCHOOL TRAINING AND JOIN TODAY

Terms and conditions:

• By using these codes you confirm that you are happy for EdPsychEd to share your purchase details with Safeguarding Network.

• If you use a member voucher you confirm you are a paying member of Safeguarding Network.

Free Webinar: School Wellbeing and Attendance: Creating a Compassionate and Child-Centre Approach - 2 December 2025

Through this webinar, Dr Jerricah Holder will provide an overview of the school wellbeing literature and key psychological models essential to understanding the needs of children who find it difficult and distressing to attend school. Moving away from the language of school refusal and with increased emphasis on a more compassionate and child-centred approach, Dr Jerricah Holder will share her ‘Integrated Model of EBSA’ enabling Designated Safeguarding Leads to develop a greater understanding of the complex and often multi-faceted aspects of school avoidance behaviours. The child and family perspective will be integrated throughout, with videos of children and parents sharing their journey.

BOOK YOUR FREE PLACE

About EdPsychEd

EdPsychEd offer a comprehensive CPD course with associated resources to support your setting’s work with Emotional Based School Avoidance. Their Horizons training takes a tiered approach to building your staff understanding of EBSA in an eLearning format with child-friendly assessment resources to support your work with students.

Effective work around attendance involves and empowers students and their families. At the request of local authorities EdPsychEd developed a learning and resource series for families to follow to improve their understanding and approach to reducing Emotional Based School Avoidance in their children.

If you would like to discuss EdPsychEd's offering please contact Dr Jenny Dutton directly, here.