Leading for CALM

Course Overview

Leading for CALM is a strategic leadership development day designed for those shaping policy, practice, and culture across education systems. Grounded in trauma-informed, rights-respecting, and relationship-focused practice, this session explores how whole organisational approaches can prevent behaviour that challenges and create conditions for safety, belonging, and growth.

Using a public health model of proactive, responsive, and recovery approaches; and drawing on Kevin Ann Huckshorn’s Six Core Strategies and the Six Principles of the CALM Approach; we support leaders to explore utilising their influence to cultivate emotionally regulated, relationally rich environments for staff, children and young people.

This input blends insight with practical strategy, equipping leaders to create congruent, values-driven systems that reduce harm, promote wellbeing, and enable everyone to thrive.

Upset Caucasian teenage girl gestures and looks at her mom while discussing problems with a counselor.

Delivery and course summary

How is the Leading for CALM Course delivered?

• A chance to reflect in person, exploring topics in arelational way.
• Opportunities to shape the input through discussion.
• Exploring challenges in a safe, confidential environment.
• Building connections with other leaders and learningfrom their experience and expertise.

Leading for CALM course- Learning Outcomes

Understand the Foundations

  • Describe how behaviour that challenges can be prevented through whole-system approaches rooted in regulation, relationships, and consistency.
  • Explain the Six Principles of the CALM Approach and how they apply at strategic, organisational, and cultural levels.
  • Understand the public health model (proactive, responsive, recovery) and its relevance to leadership decisions in education and care.

Lead Through Culture

  • Recognise the role of leadership in shaping emotionally regulated, relationally safe environments for staff and the people they serve.
  • Identify key elements of organisational culture that support or undermine consistency, safety, and trauma-informed practice.
  • Explore how strategic leadership influences staff regulation, professional behaviour, and learner experience.

Align Strategy with Values

  • Critically reflect on current systems, policies, and data to identify areas for alignment with CALM principles and restraint reduction goals.
  • Apply Kevin Ann Huckshorn’s Six Core Strategies to develop or enhance trauma-informed organisational practices.

Practice Reflective and Curious Leadership

  • Demonstrate how listening, curiosity, and presence can function as strategic leadership tools.
  • Develop confidence in asking reflective questions that promote insight, feedback, and system-wide learning.

What Will Leaders Gain?- Impact Statement

Participants will leave with:

  • A clear understanding of how whole-system approaches reduce crisis, improve consistency, and create safer environments for everyone. 

  • Tools to analyse their organisation’s current approach across the before – during – after continuum, using a public health lens.

  • Strategies to align policy, workforce development, and leadership behaviours with relational, rights-based, and trauma-informed principles

  • Confidence to lead cultural shifts that prioritise emotional regulation, reflective practice, and relational safety.

  • A deeper understanding of their legal rights and responsibilities, including key frameworks such as Included, Engaged and Involved Part 3, and the Restraint Reduction Network (RRN) Standards. Inspiration to act as leaders of safety, dignity, and recovery across the systems and communities they influence.