Becoming trauma-informed
Principles, Trauma-Informed Wales and psychologically informed environments.
Three hours on becoming trauma-informed: the principles behind the approach, Trauma-Informed Wales, psychologically informed environments and leading an organisation that is safe for everyone.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 3 hours
- Where
- Trauma-Informed Leadership and Organisations
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Leaders in housing, homelessness, health, councils and charities working with people facing adversity
Overview
This Focus moves from understanding trauma to leading an organisation shaped by that understanding. It begins with the shift from what is wrong with you to what happened to you, SAMHSA's three Es, the Welsh Adverse Childhood Experiences study, Siegel's window of tolerance and, with care, Aberfan in 1966. It then sets out SAMHSA's four Rs and six principles and Harris and Fallot's five core values, before exploring the Trauma-Informed Wales framework and the TrACE Organisations Toolkit. The fourth module covers psychologically informed environments, from Johnson and Haigh to PIE 2.0, and what the Homelessness and Social Housing Allocation (Wales) Act 2026 asks of services. It closes with Sandra Bloom's Sanctuary Model and SAMHSA's ten implementation domains.
Aims
This programme aims to develop leaders who can turn trauma-informed principles into daily practice, design environments and processes that build safety, and lead organisations that look after their own staff as well as the people they serve, in line with the Trauma-Informed Wales vision.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Explain the core ideas of trauma-informed practice, from the three Es and the four Rs to reading adversity data as population patterns rather than predictions.
- Assess your organisation against the Trauma-Informed Wales framework across policy, environment, HR, governance, data and commissioning, not only individual practice.
- Apply psychologically informed environment thinking and the Sanctuary Model to rethink rules, spaces, supervision and language so that services feel safer for staff and the people who use them.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Interpret findings such as the Welsh ACE study as population patterns rather than predictions about any one person.
- Apply the window of tolerance and the idea that behaviour is communication to how your service responds to people, drawing on the lessons of Aberfan.
- Distinguish trauma-informed services from trauma-specific services and use Harris and Fallot's five core values to test a process in your service.
- Assess your organisation across policy, environment, HR, governance, data and commissioning, comparing individual practice with an organisational system.
- Apply the idea that behaviour is communication to review how rules, venues, language and responses in your service affect people's sense of safety.
- Plan practical changes to governance, rotas, supervision, data and language, and use Heifetz's view of distress to set steadier emotional weather for staff under pressure.
Built from 2 parts.
3 hours of learning.
- 01Understanding traumaTrauma, adversity and trauma-informed principlesBitesize3 modules
- 02Environments that healPsychologically informed environments and leadershipBitesize2 modules
Keep going.
Part of the Trauma-Informed Leadership and Organisations topic, also sold whole as Safe to heal.
Go deeper, and pay only the difference
- You are hereFocus, 3 hours, £69
- The whole topicExplore, Safe to heal, 5 hours 30 minutes, £129. Already own the Focus? You pay £60.
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Prices per person. Read the full terms