New certification

EBSA Practitioner Certification

Training for coaches and school staff who work with children who cannot get through the school gate. Two live days. The frameworks schools already use, and the layer underneath them that is rarely explained.

ACCPH accredited IPHM accredited Live on Zoom Assessed

£395 launch price

Full price £695. Or split with Klarna. Included in the Training Pass.

Book the November cohort

Saturday 7 November 2026 Sunday 8 November 2026 9.30am start, both days

Over 100 coaches trained worldwide. Featured in The Guardian and on the BBC. Founded by Stuart Thompson, 25 years in anxiety and emotional health, and a former social worker.

The child is not refusing

By the time a family reaches you, everyone has already tried the obvious things. Reward charts. Firm mornings. A quiet word from the head of year. Reasoning with the child in the car park at ten past eight.

None of it works, and there is a reason for that. A child whose body has learned to expect threat at the school gate is not making a decision. The prediction has already run, in the body, before any thought arrives. You cannot negotiate with a system that has finished its work before the conversation starts.

That is what this course teaches you to see, and then what to do about it on a Tuesday morning.

Everyone in this field can tell you it is can't and not won't. Almost nobody explains why.

Why this work matters now

Persistent absence in England sits close to one in five pupils, still far above where it was before the pandemic. The severe end, children missing half their schooling or more, has kept rising even as the milder end recovers. For pupils with an education, health and care plan, severe absence is higher again.

Behind every one of those numbers is a family who cannot get an educational psychologist, cannot get CAMHS, and has been told that attendance is a legal duty. They are exhausted, frightened, and usually blamed. There is very little in the middle for them.

Who this is for

Coaches building a practice

You want a specific problem to be findable for. School attendance is a named, urgent, searched-for difficulty, and families are looking for someone who understands it. This gives you the framework, the boundaries and the confidence to take that work on.

School and pastoral staff

Pastoral leads, ELSAs, attendance and inclusion staff, SENCOs. You already know the guidance. What you want is what to say at the doorstep, how to build a return that holds, and how to keep a parent steady through it.

What makes this different

It is honest about the evidence

A 2025 systematic review of UK school-partnered approaches to school avoidance found the research base insufficient in both quantity and quality to establish what works. Nobody in this field has a proven intervention. We say so, we teach what is actually established, and we do not sell you a claim you would have to defend later.

It teaches the frameworks schools already use

The four functions of absence. Push and pull factors. Risk and resilience. These sit inside almost every local authority toolkit in the country. You will learn to work inside a school's existing process rather than arriving with a rival model, which is the difference between being invited back and being politely thanked.

It explains the mechanism

The nervous system layer underneath the frameworks. Why mornings are worst. Why the body is already committed before the child speaks. Why a graded return works when a firm one does not. This is the part almost no other training covers, and it is the part that changes what you actually do.

It is built for doing, not knowing

Half of this course is the practical work. The first phone call from a parent in crisis. The doorstep. The reintegration plan. The conversation with a school that has run out of patience.

It holds the parent too

By month three the parent is usually as dysregulated as the child, and often has stopped working to be at home. Most training ignores them entirely. Here they are part of the case.

It is assessed

You are given a case study, built from the sort of referral that actually arrives, and you work it up into a formulation: what is likely driving the avoidance, a proposed graded plan, and what sits outside your scope.

Scope of practice

This certification prepares you to work as a coach alongside a family and, where there is one, a school. It does not qualify you to assess, diagnose or treat. It does not make you an educational psychologist and it is not a substitute for one. A substantial part of day one is spent on exactly where that boundary sits and how to refer well.

The two days

Day one: what is happening

What emotionally based school avoidance is, and what the term does and does not cover
The four functions of absence, and how to work out which one you are looking at
Push and pull factors, risk and resilience
The nervous system underneath: prediction, threat, and why the morning is the hardest hour
Reading the presentation, including the child who looks fine in school
Scope, referral and safeguarding: educational psychology, CAMHS, SEND advocacy and where you sit

Day two: what you do

The first conversation with a family, and what not to promise in it
Working with the child: pace, regulation, and building tolerance without force
Building a graded return that survives a bad week
The doorstep and the car park: the practical moments everything turns on
Holding the parent, including the one who has stopped working to be at home
Working with a school without taking over its plan
Your case formulation: the case study you will work from, how it is structured, and how it is assessed

12 guided learning hours across two live days, plus the written case formulation completed in your own time.

What you receive

Two live days on Zoom with Stuart Thompson
Accredited certificate on completion of the assessment
Full digital handbook and session materials
Case studies, formulation template and a worked example
Referral and scope-of-practice guidance you can show a school
The STILL Method companion guide, Work With Your Nervous System, Not Against It
A one-to-one call on completion to talk through your first cases

Where this gets used

Delegates take this into private one-to-one work with families, into pastoral, inclusion and attendance roles inside schools, into existing coaching and therapeutic practices as a named specialism, and into alternative provision and tuition services where the child is out of school already.

Why we built it

The STILL Method has trained over a hundred coaches, and school staff have been quietly buying our anxiety and emotional regulation courses for years. The same question kept coming back from both groups. What do I do about the child who cannot get into the building?

There is training available on understanding school avoidance. There is very little that prepares someone to sit with a family through it, week after week, on the mornings it goes wrong as well as the ones it does not. That is the gap this fills.

Questions

Do I need to be a qualified coach already?

No. Around half of the people we train are career changers coming from outside coaching and therapy. What you do need is a setting to use it in, whether that is a practice you are building or a role in a school.

Is this accredited?

Yes. The STILL Method is accredited by ACCPH and IPHM, and this course carries an accredited certificate on successful completion of the assessment.

What is the assessment?

You are given a written case study to work from. You map what is going on, propose a graded plan and state clearly what falls outside your scope. There is no exam and no time limit.

Will this let me tell schools I can improve their attendance?

No, and we would ask you not to. Attendance is a number schools are measured on and it moves for many reasons that have nothing to do with you. What you can say is that you work with the child and the family on the emotional and physiological barriers to attending, alongside the school's own plan.

Can I work with families privately after this?

Yes. On completion you may describe yourself as a Certified STILL Method EBSA Practitioner and use the framework in your own client work, at fees you set. That title covers this course only. It is separate from the STILL Method Anxiety Coach Certification, which is a different qualification. You may not train other practitioners to deliver the framework.

Is it included in the Training Pass?

Yes. The Training Pass includes this certification along with everything else in the catalogue, and everything we build in the twelve months after you buy it.

What if I cannot make both days?

Come back to us and we will look at the next cohort or work something out. Please do not book expecting to attend one day of two, as the second day is where the practical work sits.

Book your place