What are the warning signs of poor physical intervention training?
Warning signs include a provider that opens with techniques rather than risk, treats de-escalation as a warm-up, promises certainty and keeps staff ratios vague. Little is said about recording or review.
What does positive handling training cost — and what changes the price?
Price is driven less by the length of the day than by the risk being trained for, staff ratios, whether the content is tailored to the school and what support follows the course.
Disproportionality in restrictive interventions: what schools should look for in the data
Reviews should ask who is being restrained, what kind of intervention was used, where and when, which staff were involved, and what changed afterwards, looking across SEND, ethnicity, age and looked-after status.
MAT-wide consistency: why trusts need one standard for restrictive interventions
Trusts do not need identical practice, but they do need shared definitions, a common decision test, banned techniques, recording expectations and parent reporting, with each school adapting training to its own pupils.
Post-incident debrief: where safer practice is built
The 2026 guidance expects schools to act after an incident. A debrief should keep welfare, facts and learning separate, so the pupil is supported with dignity and the school actually changes something.
Why schools need a training needs assessment before positive handling training
Training should be specific to a school’s requirements, so a generic course may miss the point. Seven areas to assess first are set out, among them incident patterns, locations, pupil needs and staff roles.
Ground restraint and unsafe techniques: what schools must remove from training
The 2026 guidance is applied to technique choice. Anything restricting breathing or circulation, pressing on the neck or abdomen, relying on pain, or holding a pupil down should come out of training.
Why “no-contact” policies can put schools at risk
A headteacher asked whether staff should never touch pupils. The 2026 DfE guidance says blanket no-contact policies are wrong, and four problems follow, starting with confusion between avoiding risk and managing it.
Governors and intervention data: the questions boards should be asking
Eight questions governors should ask of intervention data, covering the volume of force, restraint or seclusion, where and when incidents happen, which pupil groups appear and whether the same pupils and staff recur.
Seclusion is not a sanction: what the 2026 guidance means for safe spaces
The 2026 guidance treats seclusion as a safety measure only, never punishment, and the post separates voluntary regulation space, directed time away and seclusion, urging schools to define each clearly in policy.