The Psychology Team Behind the Partnership
EBSA Horizons addresses Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA) through a partnership programme developed and delivered by practising Educational Psychologists. Every element of the programme is overseen and refined by the psychology team who work alongside you throughout.
The people who authored the training, built the assessment tools, and designed the delivery model are the same people who sit in your steering group meetings.
Practising Psychologists From Design to Delivery
Your steering group meetings, your training content, and your impact evaluation are led by the people who designed the programme. Each psychologist is HCPC-registered and maintains a current caseload alongside their EBSA Horizons work.
Dr Jerricah Holder
EBSA Research & Training Lead
Specialist Child, Educational & Community Psychologist
Jerricah developed all EBSA Horizons training content, including the video modules, case studies, and assessment tools that underpin the programme. With over a decade of specialist EBSA practice, she has trained over 6,000 professionals across the UK and speaks regularly at national conferences on school attendance and anxiety.
Her experience means the trainings are psychologically rigorous while remaining accessible for school staff, multi-agency professionals, and families. She authored the EBSA Risk and Resilience Profile, developed the three-tiered training framework, and continues to strengthen the programme in response to emerging research and feedback from partner authorities.
Dr Jenny Dutton
Strategic Implementation Lead
Child, Educational & Community Psychologist
Jenny leads the strategic design and delivery of EBSA Horizons partnerships, working directly with commissioners to ensure each one aligns with existing priorities. For a Local Authority, that might mean mapping to the graduated response. For a trust, embedding within a wider inclusion strategy. For an ICB, framing the work as upstream prevention.
Her work spans education, health, and social care, with particular expertise in aligning delivery with statutory requirements, Supporting Families programmes, and local attendance improvement plans. She chairs steering group meetings and is your primary strategic contact throughout.
Dr Richard Skelton
Operations & Sustainable Impact Lead
Child, Educational & Community Psychologist
Richard leads the impact evaluation and outcome reporting across all partner authorities, trusts, and health partnerships. He analyses attendance data, training completion, and programme effectiveness to build a clear picture of what is changing and where.
His reporting gives each authority, trust, or health partner the evidence to demonstrate measurable outcomes for the audiences that matter: elected member briefings, trust board papers, ICB reviews, and DfE returns. He also oversees quality assurance and keeps delivery consistent, from a 30-school MAT through to a 400-school authority-wide rollout.
Delivery and Operations
Behind the psychology team sits a delivery team with direct experience of schools, Local Authority services, trust operations, and multi-agency coordination. When the delivery runs well, schools engage sooner, staff and professionals complete their training, and children benefit faster.
Sam Adkins
Systems Operations Director
Whether a Head of SEND is reviewing progress across their authority, a trust inclusion lead is comparing academies, or a health partner is tracking uptake among professionals, the reporting needs to be reliable and current. Sam builds and maintains the systems that make that possible.
Petra Pearce
Partnership Coordination Lead
When a partnership involves schools, LA services, trust leadership, and health professionals, coordination matters. Petra connects the moving parts, making sure each group feels supported from first contact and that nothing falls through the gaps as the work scales.
Melanie Mason
Technical Operations Manager
School staff logging on during a busy lunchbreak, a health practitioner accessing training between sessions, and a parent working through the course at home all need it to work first time. Melanie keeps the training courses running and makes sure they do.
Andrew Gunnett
Schools Partnership Manager
Leads school engagement and onboarding, whether that means coordinating a phased rollout across a multi-academy trust or supporting individual schools joining an authority-wide partnership. He adapts to each setting's capacity and context, turning registration into sustained engagement.
Collective Track Record
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Local Authority and trust partnerships across the UK
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Professionals trained through EBSA Horizons programmes
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Schools engaged across partner authorities and trusts
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Rate the training as very or incredibly helpful
What Guides Our Work
Children First, Always
Every decision we make begins with the child who emotionally struggles to walk through the school gate. This shapes the programme in practical ways. The training includes parent and pupil voices because understanding the child's experience changes professional responses. The assessment tools focus on what the child needs to feel safe. When we measure impact, attendance is only meaningful alongside wellbeing.
Build Capacity, Not Dependency
The purpose of the partnership is to leave your system stronger than we found it. The training, the tools, the assessment frameworks, and the internal expertise that develop over two years are designed to outlast them. There is the breadth of culture change alongside the depth of specialists available when needed. There is positive change at every level. That is the point.
Work With What You Have
Every Local Authority, trust, and health system already has professionals, initiatives, and knowledge. Our role is to strengthen and coordinate what exists. We integrate with your strategy, your language, and your existing initiatives, so the initiative feels like a natural extension of what your teams are already doing. We facilitate and streamline existing initiatives to free up more specialist capacity.
EBSA Horizons CIC
Community Interest Company
EBSA Horizons is registered as a Community Interest Company in England and Wales. An asset lock prevents revenue from being extracted as private profit. Every pound of partnership income is reinvested into research, programme development, and reaching more children and families who need support.
This structure means our interests are permanently aligned with yours. We succeed when children attend school and feel well, when professionals feel equipped, and when systems work. The work improves because each partnership teaches us something new, and the revenue funds the research that makes the next one stronger.
Meet the Team Behind the Partnership
Book a 30-minute conversation with our psychology team. We will walk through how this would sit within your existing strategy, discuss what the timeline would look like for your context, and share what comparable partners are seeing. A genuine professional conversation between people who understand your challenges first-hand.