In care, the environment is always shifting. New guidance, staffing pressures, rising complexity of needs, evolving risks, a growing call for preventative practices – the list is endless. However many organisations across the UK are still delivering the same behaviour training they implemented five, ten, even fifteen years ago.
It’s not because they don’t care, but because it’s simply what’s in place. It’s embedded, familiar. On paper, it ticks the right boxes. But the question is, is it still doing what you need it to do? This is a question we believe every care provider should be asking.
Practice Moves Faster Than Policy
Most organisations aren’t ignoring training, they’ve invested in it. It’s on the matrix. Staff are attending refreshers and there’s a certificate on file. But the lived experience of the frontline often tells a different story to what’s provided.
Teams are dealing with increasingly complex behaviours, behaviours that can’t be neatly contained by step-by-step procedures. Trauma histories, unmet needs, neurodiversity, anxiety and emotional distress all play a role in how people present. And yet many PBM models still approach behaviour as something to be managed, rather than understood.
If training doesn’t evolve alongside the people we support, it quickly becomes rigid, and in that gap between theory and reality, risk increases.
Crisis Prevention, Not Just Crisis Response
Too often, behaviour training is geared towards what to do when something goes wrong, rather than how to stop it escalating in the first place. The focus becomes reactive: holds, protocols, breakaway techniques. But what about prevention? What about the quiet cues of distress that appear long before someone lashes out or shuts down?
Effective positive behaviour management training should give staff more than physical interventions. It should help them notice what others miss: shifts in tone, body language, regulation. It should build their confidence to intervene early, relationally and ethically, before a situation becomes unsafe for everyone involved.
The Missing Layer: Trauma-Informed Thinking
When behaviour is viewed only through the lens of compliance, we risk misinterpreting those who are in distress. Trauma-informed practice challenges us to go deeper. To ask: “What happened to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”
The question then becomes: does your current training reflect this? Does it help your staff understand the physiology of trauma, or how to co-regulate with someone in crisis? Does it support the building of safe relationships, or just focus on procedural correctness?
When Training Doesn’t Fit the Environment
Even the most respected training programmes can fall short when they ignore context. A model developed for acute mental health may not translate to supported living environments. A set of holds that work in secure units might feel completely inappropriate in a mainstream school.
What we’re seeing on the ground is that high staff turnover, budget constraints, and increasingly diverse needs are creating teams with wildly different levels of experience, confidence, and expectations. Many organisations have staff trained under multiple models, creating confusion and inconsistency, both for teams and for those receiving care.
Training must be relevant to your environment. It must take into account your risk profile, your culture, your people, and it must be flexible enough to adapt.
The Right Questions to Ask
So, is your Positive Behaviour Management training still fit for purpose?
Ask yourself:
- Does it prevent crisis episodes, or only respond to it?
- Does it reflect trauma-informed practice, or fall back on control?
- Does it fit your current environment, risks and service users?
- Do your staff feel confident using it?
If you’d like to talk through your current approach, understand how it compares to sector standards, or just sense-check whether your training is still fit for purpose, we’re happy to have that conversation, informally, and without obligation.
Let’s raise the standard. Not just of the training itself, but of how we approach and think about it.
