Behaviour and Relationships

Never before have so many children been labelled with ADHD – not just labelled but also given powerful amphetamines as a ‘treatment’. ADHD is described as impacting on school-aged children and resulting in restlessness, impulsive actions, and lack of focus impairing their ability to learn properly.

This is a practical ‘non medical’day for front line Early Years and school based classroom practitioners working with children and young people with serious attachment issues arising from loss, trauma and abuse. We look at what Psychology may help us in our understanding of children who have faced issues with love and attachment. Splitting, handling projected feelings, constancy and permanence are explored.

In this practical workshop session we will explore ways of including people who have been labelled as being on the autism spectrum. The session will be values based and practical and will aim to allow the sharing of experiences and good practice as well promoting innovative approaches to inclusion through the design of best practice.

This radical way of building empathy is inspired by the work of the ‘Roots of Empathy’ organisation in Canada. Roots of Empathy (ROE) is dedicated to building caring and peaceful societies through the development of empathy in children. It is a parenting education programme for elementary school students (between the ages of 3 to 14 years) based on monthly visits to the classroom by a parent and infant from the school neighbourhood.

This is our lead workshop/training day on behaviour and relationship work in schools, Childcare and Early Years settings and is both a values primer and a practical guide to successful innovative strategies for improving behaviour and strengthening relationships for challenging children and young people of all ages.

Circle of Friends is an approach to enhancing the inclusion, in a mainstream setting, of any child or young person who is experiencing difficulties in school because of disability, personal crisis or because of their challenging behaviour towards others. The ‘circle of friends’ approach works by mobilising the young person’s peers to provide support and engage in problem solving with the person in difficulty.

Circles of adults is a process that ‘listens deeper’ to generate reflective problem solving that can create lasting behaviour change and effective behaviour intervention plans. This is a particularly valuable process for those looking to enhance their leadership and facilitation skills or to build such processes into their school or team approach to complex pupils.

Circles of Storytelling is a narrative process that listens deeper using stories to generate reflective problem solving that can create lasting behaviour change and effective behaviour intervention plans. This is a particularly valuable process for those looking to enhance their leadership and facilitation skills or to build such processes into their school or team approach to complex pupils.

This workshop gives an opportunity to focus on the emotional needs of children and young people and how to meet these. We lift the lid on an emerging urgent inclusion issue, meeting the emotional well being of all children. In one year 1300 young men committed suicide in the UK. In the UK the commonest cause of death among those aged 16-35 is suicide.

Click to read more about this training, in which we demonstrate a live problem solving approach which is based on the active participation of family members.

This workshop gives an opportunity to focus on the emotional needs of girls and how to meet these. We lift the lid on a less well explored inclusion issue, meeting the emotional needs of girls. Everyone knows a girl or woman. They may be pupil, daughter, sister, parent or partner.

Inclusion Facilitation (IF) is an approach to enhancing the inclusion, in a mainstream community of any child or young person who is experiencing difficulties in the world because of disability, personal crisis or because of their challenging behaviour towards others. Inclusion Facilitation is designed to create a better life for an individual by the provision of an intense input designed to being about social change. This usually entails a series of visits focused on getting the person out and about to increase confidence, social skills and presence in their local community and to pursue goals and dreams.

This can be introduced in one day but is better offered over a series of twilight or half day workshops with individualised coaching. We will provide background context for this approach and will directly model the process with real live issues facing participants. So bring your most challenging concerns to this training.

This course is an overview of the needs of young people in public care and provides examples of how these needs can be met. This is the group of young people who are highly vulnerable to becoming adults who are in prison, on the street or experiencing mental health needs. Despite this their needs too often continue not to be met and they are very likely to be excluded or placed in special settings.

In this course we explore Mental Health and address how such needs can be met in mainstream classrooms.

Legislation and national and local Government initiatives confront us all with the challenge of working together in the interests of the most vulnerable and the most challenging more effectively than we do today. In this training day we explore these challenges and consider successful ways of setting the conditions for effective multi agency working.

In this course we explore how we have attempted to build inclusive circles of support around individuals and contrast this with a radical approach to problem solving with parents – the Parent Solutions Circle. Parent Solutions is a brand new approach to problem solving with parents based on our live group work in schools. A focus on challenging behaviour brings interest, energy and commitment. 

Peer mediation is an approach to impacting on conflict resolution and bullying in primary and secondary schools by training pupils to be mediators or  ‘counsellors’. This well proven, highly effective method of impacting on school based bullying is still viewed by some as radical. In this workshop participants are introduced to the key components of successful schemes. Our trainers have first hand experience of setting up school based schemes and sustaining these over time.

This video gives a brief taster of the work in a Nottingham Primary school.

In this practical workshop session we will explore ways of problem solving around complex situations. The session will be practical and will aim to allow the sharing of experiences and good practice as well promoting innovative approaches to problem solving around systemic, organisational as well as individual inclusion issues.

A “Restorative Solution” is a non-adversarial approach to conflict resolution where the person who has done something wrong in a given situation becomes accountable to those s/he has harmed. This person is then given the opportunity to “make up” for their inappropriate behaviour through agreement and reparation. An intervention can involve a formal conference, or it can be a simple conversation on a corridor or playground.

This training explores a powerful way of capture what communities have to tell about what they have learned about dealing with hard times. This narrative approach to strengthening community work is being used in a range of communities around the world and is relevant to strengthening schools, parents, community groups, organisations in the UK and elsewhere.

Reaching troubled families is now a target for many working in Children’s Services- Education and Social Care. What fresh approaches can we design to enable more access to services and opportunities? The challenge is to get isolated people and families who participate little (and who are often the clients of Services) outside of the world of clients and services.