Aim: This presentation aims to deepen understanding of emotion-based school avoidance (EBSA) and provide educators and clinicians with clear, evidence-based intervention ideas that are practical to implement. It also explores what schools can do to meaningfully reengage learners who are struggling to attend based on recent research.
Background/context: EBSA is a complex and increasingly prevalent challenge with significant consequences for students' academic engagement, social development, and long-term wellbeing. School avoidance rarely reflects a single cause, instead emerging from an interplay of individual, relational, school, and family factors — many of which are rooted in experiences of stress, anxiety, and trauma.
Relevance: The presentation applies a trauma-informed lens to school avoidance, moving beyond punitive or attendance-focused responses. The Reconnect to School Kit supports educators and clinicians to identify the drivers of a student's avoidance and choose targeted, evidence-based interventions to address them.
Contribution: This work offers a cross-sector framework for collaborative, evidence-based responses to EBSA, and introduces a completely free digital case formulation tool that translates trauma-informed principles into everyday school and clinical practice.
Description: Practitioners work through a structured set of questions about the student's presenting situation, drawing on information gathered from the student, family, and school. The tool analyses these responses to generate tailored intervention recommendations that can guide planning across home, school, and clinical settings.
Engagement: Attendees will be invited to explore the digital tool and reflect on case-based examples, leaving with practical strategies for identifying and managing drivers of school avoidance.

This interactive workshop develops educator capacity to implement trauma transformation through professional peer supervision, using the Reflective Circle Education Model (RCEM). While educators are expected to respond to the complex impacts of trauma, education systems offer limited formal structures for professional support. This absence leaves teachers carrying significant emotional and relational labour, undermining their capacity to remain regulated in complex environments. RCEM addresses this gap by reconceptualising supervision as a structured, relational, and critically reflective group process. Grounded in psychological safety and critical reflection, the model has been implemented across a diversity of settings including primary, secondary, specialist, and alternative education contexts, often working with young people experiencing complex adversity and marginalisation, demonstrating that trauma transformation is not simply an outcome of practice, but is enacted through structured, collective peer supervision.
This positions educator wellbeing, relational safety, and ethical responsibility as core conditions for sustaining teacher regulation and trauma-aware practice in trauma-impacted contexts, challenging individualised and strategy-based approaches. RCEM offers an evidence-based, scalable model for embedding trauma-aware professional supervision within educational systems. Drawing on mixed-methods research, findings demonstrate impacts on educator reflexivity, professional agency, and capacity for self-regulation, alongside sustained trauma-aware practice change.
In this workshop, participants will engage directly in a facilitated reflective circle, experiencing trauma-aware professional learning through guided reflection and collaborative dialogue, with opportunities to apply insights to their own contexts and consider implications for system-level change.