What is trauma-informed practice?
Trauma-informed practice is an approach to care, education, and support that recognises the widespread impact of adverse experiences on development, behaviour, and wellbeing. Instead of asking "what is wrong with this person?", trauma-informed practitioners ask "what has happened to this person?" It shifts the lens from deficit to understanding.
The evidence is clear: the majority of people in children's residential care, special education, adult social care, and mental health services have significant histories of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). These experiences reshape brain development, regulate emotional capacity, and create survival patterns that look, from the outside, like challenging behaviour.
Trauma-informed practice gives staff the understanding to read these patterns accurately, and the skills to respond in ways that build safety and connection rather than triggering further dysregulation. You can explore the foundations in more detail in our complete guide to trauma-informed practice.
Trauma-informed vs trauma-responsive: why the distinction matters
These two terms are often used interchangeably. They are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most training fails.
Awareness
Understanding that people may have experienced trauma, and that this shapes how they think, feel, and behave. Most training stops here. It is necessary, but not sufficient.
Action
Actively changing your environment, language, relationships, and systems to account for trauma in every interaction, policy, and practice. This is where real change happens.
The +ProActive difference: Most providers teach trauma awareness and call it trauma-informed training. +ProActive Approaches trains teams to be trauma-responsive, embedding this understanding into every interaction, every policy, every physical space, and every supervisory conversation. Being informed is the starting point. Being responsive is the destination.
This distinction is the foundation of the RIPPLE Framework, developed by Simon Gower through 30 years of frontline practice. RIPPLE gives organisations a structured, evidence-based pathway from awareness to embedded, responsive practice. It is not a slogan. It is a system.
The five principles of trauma-responsive practice
The +ProActive trauma-responsive framework is built around five interconnected principles. These are not abstract values. Each one has direct, practical implications for how your team behaves, communicates, and responds every day.
Safety
Physical and psychological
The nervous system cannot learn, connect, or regulate in an environment it perceives as threatening. Safety is not simply the absence of danger: it is an actively created experience of predictability, calm, and physical and emotional protection. Trauma-responsive practice requires that safety is designed into every interaction, environment, and policy.
Trust
Consistency, reliability, transparency
Many of the people we support have learnt through painful experience that adults are unpredictable, unreliable, or unsafe. Rebuilding trust requires staff to be consistent in their responses, transparent in their intentions, and reliable over time. Trust is not given: it is earned through thousands of small, repeated interactions.
Choice
Empowerment and collaboration
Trauma frequently involves experiences of powerlessness and loss of control. Restoring agency through genuine choices, collaborative decision-making, and transparent communication is a therapeutic act in itself. Trauma-responsive practice consistently looks for ways to expand choice and increase felt control.
Connection
Relationships as the vehicle for change
Neuroscience is unambiguous: the relational context is not the backdrop to change, it is the mechanism. Healing from trauma happens in relationships. The therapeutic alliance between a young person and their keyworker, or between a pupil and their teacher, is the most powerful intervention in any care or education setting.
Understanding
Behaviour as communication, not defiance
Every behaviour communicates something about an unmet need, an unresolved experience, or a felt threat. Trauma-responsive practice trains staff to decode the message beneath the behaviour rather than simply responding to its surface presentation. This shift from reaction to understanding is what changes outcomes.
Who is trauma-informed practice training for?
Trauma-responsive training is relevant to any setting where people with histories of adversity are supported. +ProActive Approaches delivers bespoke programmes tailored to the context of each sector.
Children's residential homes
Supporting residential childcare workers and managers to understand the trauma histories of looked-after children and respond with therapeutic consistency.
Children's behaviour supportSchools and education
Equipping teachers and school staff to understand ACEs, recognise trauma responses in the classroom, and build regulated, inclusive learning environments.
+ProActive SchoolsAdult social care
Training support workers and care teams to recognise and respond to trauma in adults with learning disabilities, mental health needs, and complex histories.
Adult social care trainingHealthcare and NHS
Helping NHS staff and healthcare professionals to understand trauma presentation in acute, community, and mental health settings.
Healthcare and PMVA trainingWhat makes +ProActive different
There are many training providers who use the word "trauma-informed". The +ProActive approach is built on a fundamentally different foundation.
We train teams to actively change practice, not just raise awareness. Knowing about trauma and responding to it in real time, under pressure, with a dysregulated person in front of you, are very different skills.
Our training draws on Polyvagal Theory (Stephen Porges), the neurosequential model (Bruce Perry), and the neuroscience of developmental trauma (Bessel van der Kolk). Staff understand not just what to do, but why it works.
Simon Gower, founder of +ProActive Approaches, has spent more than 30 years working directly in residential childcare, schools, and care settings. The training is practical because it comes from practice.
Simon is the author of The Empathy Gap and Removing the Barriers to Learning, two books that have become essential reading in residential childcare and school behaviour support across the UK.
Our approach has been independently evaluated by MMU, with funding from the Burdett Trust for Nursing and NHS Health Research Authority ethical approval. The evidence is independent, not self-reported.
Trauma-responsive understanding is integrated throughout our BILD Act certified training. Physical intervention training is delivered within a framework that treats restraint as a last resort within a therapeutic relationship.
Our proprietary RIPPLE Framework gives organisations a structured pathway to embed trauma-responsive practice at every level: individual, team, and organisational. It is the system that makes the training stick.
The evidence
Trauma-responsive practice is not a set of ideas. It is a measurable approach with independently verified outcomes.
Reduction in incidents
Organisations implementing +ProActive training consistently report reductions in restrictive interventions and behavioural incidents of 70 to 80%.
Independent evaluation
Our approach has been independently evaluated by Manchester Metropolitan University, funded by the Burdett Trust for Nursing, with NHS HRA ethical approval.
Certified training provider
All +ProActive programmes are certified against the Restraint Reduction Network Training Standards, the national benchmark recognised by Ofsted, CQC, and NHS England.
ATSSA ratings for schools
Schools that have implemented the +ProActive approach have achieved ATSSA Outstanding for Behaviour gradings following training.
What you will learn
Our trauma-responsive training equips staff with both understanding and practical skills. These are the core outcomes of the programme.
ACEs and brain development
Understanding adverse childhood experiences and their neurological impact on emotional regulation, learning, and behaviour.
Recognising trauma responses
Learning to identify fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses beneath behaviours that present as aggression, shutdown, manipulation, or defiance.
Building therapeutic relationships
Developing the relational skills that make safety and connection possible, including attunement, co-regulation, and rupture and repair.
Implementing PACE
Applying Dan Hughes' PACE model (Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy) as a relational stance that communicates safety and unconditional regard.
Environmental strategies for safety
Designing and adapting physical environments, daily routines, and communication styles to reduce triggers and increase felt safety.
Staff wellbeing and secondary trauma
Understanding vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue, and building individual and organisational strategies for staff regulation and resilience.