From Awareness to Systems Change

The six Core Trainings translate the theoretical foundations of trauma-informed practice into practical, relational, and reflective learning experiences.
Together, they form a structured pathway that moves from personal understanding to professional application, and ultimately to organisational and systemic transformation.

Each training builds on the previous one — deepening self-awareness, strengthening ethical and relational practice, and embedding trauma-informed principles within research, education, and leadership.
While designed as a progressive learning journey, each module can also be taken independently, offering flexible entry points for different roles, sectors, and levels of experience.
Across all six cores, participants will:

This one-day training introduces the foundations of trauma-informed and capability-based research practice. It supports researchers, peer researchers, and practitioners to understand how trauma, power, and context shape both the research process and the wellbeing of all involved.

The session combines theory, reflection, and experiential activity to develop a grounded understanding of what it means to conduct safe, ethical, and empowering research with people affected by trauma or structural disadvantage.

This one-day training explores how to develop, support and sustain meaningful participation within research and evaluation.
It blends trauma-informed principles with creative, age-responsive, and capability-based approaches to participation.

Drawing on years of lived-experience research and co-production practice, the session helps participants to move beyond involvement “in name only” toward genuine shared power, safety and inclusion.

This training explores how to design, collect, and analyse data across qualitative, quantitative, and creative methods through a trauma-informed lens.
Participants learn how to create research environments that prioritise emotional, physical, and digital safety; address material inequalities; and interpret findings in ways that uphold dignity, autonomy, and inclusion.

Building on Core 1 (Trauma-Informed Researcher Skills) and Core 2 (Peer Research & Co-Production Practice), this session brings trauma-informed principles into the practical heart of research — where ethics meet method.

It recognises that the ways we collect and represent data are never neutral: they shape whether research reproduces harm or becomes a space of care and empowerment.

This training supports researchers, practitioners, and leaders to design, deliver, and interpret evaluation and impact frameworks through trauma-informed and capability-based principles.

Participants will explore how evaluation can move beyond compliance and performance reporting to become a process of learning, reflection, and systemic care. The course draws on cross-sector examples — from research projects to organisational change programmes — to illustrate how evaluation can capture both measurable outcomes and lived experience.

Building on Core 3 (Data Collection & Analysis), this session focuses on how evidence is used: how data becomes learning, accountability, and impact, and how those processes can either reproduce harm or foster empowerment and belonging.

This core training explores how trauma-informed principles can be embedded across teaching, curriculum design, and student support within post-16, Further, and Higher Education settings.

It recognises that educational environments can be sites of both recovery and retraumatisation, and that belonging, participation, and achievement are profoundly shaped by how institutions understand — or overlook — experiences of trauma, adversity, and care.

The programme provides two complementary, full-day modules that can be delivered together as a two-day professional learning sequence or taken independently, depending on participant role and focus.
Together, they equip educators, professional services staff, and institutional leaders to teach about care experience ethically, and to support care-experienced and estranged students through trauma-informed and capability-enhancing practice.

This one-day training supports professionals, researchers, and leaders who use lived experience as part of their practice, leadership, or advocacy. It explores how to sustain ethical, reflective, and trauma-informed approaches to leadership within complex systems — balancing authenticity and boundaries, advocacy and influence, visibility and safety.

Participants will reflect on their personal and professional identities, explore the emotional labour of lived-experience leadership, and learn strategies for regulation, supervision, and reflective practice.
It also equips organisations to understand how to create safe, equitable structures for lived-experience roles, ensuring that voice, participation, and power-sharing are embedded systemically rather than in a tokenistic way.