I met a friend for coffee yesterday and during the conversation she said her granddaughter is suffering from EBSA, I’d never heard of it but apparently
EBSA stands for Emotionally Based School Avoidance, a term used in the UK to describe severe difficulty attending school due to overwhelming emotional distress, such as anxiety or fear. Unlike truancy or defiant behavior, children experiencing EBSA often want to attend school but feel emotionally or physically unable to cope with the school environment.
I don’t know when things changed but when I was at school parents could be fined for not ensuring their children attended school regularly, I had first hand experience having been caught playing truant more than once !
An ex coworker was fined recently over her teenage daughter’s non attendance. I think the fine was around £200 , the magistrate reduced the fine marginally because cooperation and not challenging the case were taken into consideration.
I played truant once, spent the day just hanging around in Regents Park keeping an eye open for the police. In those days if you weren’t in school when you should have been you’d often be questioned by the old Bill, there was a very visible police presence back then. How times have changed.
Oh, and my parents found out and there were consequences, no karate lessons for a week or two!
That’s seriously going under the radar Spitty!
Having said that there were some kids that were hardly ever at school, I’m talking about a couple of years!
I was carried into school kicking and screaming aged five and hated every minute of it until leaving at fifteen, no idea why and it’s one of my biggest regrets
I hated my first days of school, was in tears and inconsolable, a bit like you I don’t know why, the smell of play-doh stays with to this very day. From then on school largely became something to dislike, challenge and rebel against, just a bad start or something deeper perhaps?
I guess I’ll never know.
I absolutely hated state day school where I was continuously referred to as “that filthy stinking yid” but my life changed for the better when I was sent to boarding school where I excelled because everyone treated everybody with respect and the staff encouraged me to always try and do better, which I did.
A friend of mine had similar challenges with her daughter. Once leaving school she was diagnosed with being autistic and she worked with a counselor to help understand her personality.
I think for any kid being afraid of going to school for whatever reason must be very difficult for them and the anxiety it must cause.
I believe most of the conditions we read about today, and sometimes judge without understanding, have been with generations for sometime.
We just had to get on with it How many school reports said, lacks concentration, lazy, disruptive. Those kids who were quiet and labeled ‘weird’
There’s certainly greater awareness and acceptance of Autism than ever before. I have worked in the classroom, albeit part time supporting children with additional needs. Or course I had preconceptions but actually being in that environment was a real eye opener, there was a high ratio of staff to children as you might imagine.
I was intending to train as a teaching assistant working with special needs children and began with work experience…then along came COVID and scuppered the plan!
Looking at the world we live in with all the violence and crime, some of it taking place in schools with kids stabbing each other etc. and taking knives to school for protection it’s no wonder many of them are anxious about attending
The state school in the Borough of Kensington where I was sent to first has been made-over or in more modern terms, transformed from plain ordinary jnr + snr, to a much posher version of the same thing and renamed as an ‘Academy’ and now is listed as a desirable education establishment; plus, it has ‘lost’ the juniors to somewhere else. Hopefully, the pupils will be less aggressively ‘assertive’ than in my days there.
I wouldn’t want to be a parent with school aged kids these days for various reasons.
Looking back to when i was at school, we had some fairly disruptive kids in our class, to the point where they would literally throw their chairs around the classroom, if the teacher asked them, for example, to read out loud or answer a question.
Back then we assumed they were being ‘naughty’, but fairly obvious now that there was something else going on with them.
Autism etc., wasn’t known about back then.
I remember the Classroom, disruption was the only option towards the end. the silent one’s went on to have careers, for better or for worse, in the midst of all that chaos
