ELSA

ELSA stands for emotional learning support assistant. At Ss Philip and James, our ELSA is Katie Sayer. Katie is an experienced teaching assistant, having worked at the school for a number of years. During that time, she has worked with children with a variety of needs from across the whole school. Katie completed her ELSA training in the academic year 2025-26 and is now able to work with pupils in the afternoon sessions, providing them with social and emotional skills support.

The way that ELSA works is that teachers are able to refer pupils to the ELSA, highlighting an area of need and gaining pupil input into the aims of the sessions. The ELSA will then triage their live list of referrals to identify pupils to work with for a short period of time (around 6-12 weeks). This may take the form of individual sessions or small group work. At the end of this period, the ELSA will share feedback with the pupil, class teacher and parents. Although ELSA is not meant to be an ongoing intervention, it may be appropriate for a child to return to the ELSA after an initial set of sessions to work on new aims.

ELSAs attend regular professional supervision from education psychologists to continue to develop new ideas and access support. ELSAs are line managed within their own schools; our inclusion lead is Liam Bovey Hull. To find out more about ELSAs, please visit: www.elsanetwork.org