Hirstwood Training offers in-house and virtual training to support schools in creating and delivering a consistent and cohesive strategy for multi-sensory learning approaches for all pupils.
Our priority has always been to ensure our learners get the highest quality education by delivering training combining practical theory, effective pedagogy and resource ideas. We have a long-standing reputation for inspiring and enthusing staff in all things sensory!
Our approach to continuing professional development integrates INSET (in-service training), live and online events, and online learning bundles into a cohesive and versatile framework that meets the diverse needs of teachers and support staff in special education.
This hybrid training model means that we can offer ongoing support that is cost-effective, targeted, and creates a difference in daily classroom practice. Training is interactive, thought-provoking, and fun, with learning outcomes that challenge thinking and support change in practice in your school.
This multi-faceted approach ensures that schools and practitioners have access to a rich and varied professional development experience that supports immediate application and long-term growth.
Bespoke INSET
We specialise in delivering multi-speaker carousel INSET days, which are engaging, interactive, and tailored to individual schools and organisations’ diverse needs. Our multi-speaker carousel model energises a whole school team while delivering knowledge and practical strategies in one highly impactful day. We do this by offering you the following:
Bespoke Content
We collaborate with you to identify the key themes and focus areas for your INSET. Each speaker we suggest has expertise in a specific topic to ensure their session is relevant and impactful.
Multiple Expert Speakers
The carousel format features a variety of speakers, each delivering focused sessions on their specialised topic. Experts from the Hirstwood team, such as Les Staves, Nick Sheffield, and other well-known expert speakers, bring unique perspectives and practical ideas.
Rotational Format
Your staff can rotate between sessions, allowing small groups to engage with each speaker in a more interactive and personalised setting.
This format ensures a dynamic day with plenty of variety and opportunities for hands-on presentations combined with more theory-based presentations. It also means that we can accommodate bigger staff groups!
Practical Collaborative and Actionable
Our sessions focus on practical techniques and resources that colleagues can implement immediately in their classrooms or settings. Reflective practices and discussions help participants consider how to adapt strategies to their contexts. The carousel format supports collaboration, encouraging team discussions and shared learning as participants rotate through the sessions. Teachers and teaching assistants leave with a sense of shared purpose and a toolkit of ideas to apply immediately.
Flexibility in Delivery
INSET carousel days can be delivered in-person, virtually, or both, depending on your needs and preferences. Our workshops can be repeated in the morning and afternoon to offer the widest choice possible for your colleagues.
Impact
Our carousel INSET approach has been well-received in schools for its interactive and engaging style; check out our testimonial!
How does our INSET offering work with our other CPD offers?
Our INSET training energises a whole school team, and you can sustain this enthusiasm by following your INSET with an online learning bundle. INSET creates a foundation developed through ongoing learning that is flexible and fits in with CPD opportunities in your school calendar.
Our ‘Live & Online’ events allow you to introduce or expand on topics explored during INSET training for specific individuals or groups of staff.
Our Online Learning Bundles offer flexible, self-paced professional development. These curated videos, resources, and activities are available on our dedicated e-learning platform. They provide in-depth coverage of key topics, such as sensory strategies, behaviour, or creating autism-friendly classrooms. Bundles include practical reflective questions and activities to reinforce learning.
How Our CPD Offers Work Together
Customisation: You can mix and match all options to suit your needs. Choosing an INSET day could be the starting point, with staff encouraged to attend a live event or access online bundles for deeper exploration of key topics and themes. Or do the reverse, finishing with a carousel INSET to draw together the learning throughout your CPD journey.
Consistency: The same core messages and strategies are reinforced across formats, ensuring a cohesive approach to professional development.
Flexibility: Staff at different skill levels or with varying availability can engage in learning that suits them and their CPD time, whether live or on-demand.
Sustainability: Online Learning Bundles and ‘live & online’ events act as a resource library for long-term use, ensuring that knowledge gained during INSET or live events continues to develop and grow.
Continuous Learning: Our CPD offers are ideal for creating a culture of constant learning, as staff can choose a style of CPD that suits them, explore key topics at different levels of complexity, create an action plan to implement ideas using reflective practice, revisit materials as required, and collaborate with their team to create impact in the classroom.
Create your bespoke INSET agenda by selecting a combination of the sessions below!
How to create a sensory classroom with Richard Hirstwood
Every classroom is a multisensory room. Let us help you to make your classroom a great environment for successful learning.
Each year, you need to adapt your classroom environment to match the sensory abilities of your new pupils.
How do we make sure that pupils can take part in the sensory learning opportunities on offer? How does the environment support this engagement and interaction?
We can show you a range of ideas and strategies for developing sensory spaces; from large classrooms to the smallest sensory corners!
Playing with the Curriculum! with Carol Allen
The term ‘Play’ is used daily and usually carries connotations of unstructured, random engagement with activities with little or no educational weight. Nothing could be further from the truth. Play is a complex and effective strategy that engages and empowers our learners. This lively session will explore the nature of play and how we can ensure that our learners benefit from opportunities to access our curriculum areas and targets via a play-based pedagogy.
Inclusive Environments: supporting learners with visual and sensory impairments with Richard Hirstwood
Richard will examine how visual and hearing loss, often linked with broader sensory impairments, affects learning, focusing on how to adapt a sensory curriculum to support these learners.
A practical session follows, during which you will use simulation glasses to experience a variety of visual impairments in the classroom and the wider school environment. Richard will include transitions, which are often trickier for learners with VI to navigate. This experiential learning culminates in using an environmental audit. Richard will demonstrate how to assess and modify learning environments to better support learners with visual impairments, sharing many ideas and resources which can be easily used and changed within the learning environment.
Creating engaging sensory stories with Richard Hirstwood
A sensory story is a vehicle used to deliver many outcomes. Relaxation; specific learning targets; interaction; sharing with others; communication…the list can be endless!
But there is much more to sensory stories than picking up a book and reading it from front to back!
To engage our learners it needs to be multisensory, but how multisensory does it need to be?
In this fun and engaging session, we look at the importance of:
how a sensory story supports learning
‘bite-size’ stories and how to choose them
why repetition is your friend
how to use digital/mobile technology to enhance the interactivity of a story
choosing multisensory stimuli for your story
At the end of this session, you will be confident to create your own multisensory story full of engaging sensory learning opportunities!
Functional and Creative Literacy with Carol Allen
This session will begin with deconstructing a class story to examine core and fringe vocabulary, themes and opportunities for cross-curricular links and activities.
We will then explore the link between literacy and communication, particularly the opportunities for offering oracy activities.
We’ll then move to various creative opportunities to engage pupils with limited life experiences to make their writing more creative.
Breaking down the barriers to play with children with autism with Clive Smith
This is a powerful and thought-provoking session. We enable you to experience your school and learning environments as your multisensory impaired learners do.
We simulate different tactile, visual and hearing impairments. Then working in pairs, with one enabler and one experiencer; you explore and move around the school environment.
Many commentators on children with autism tell us that this group of children don’t play. This session confirms that they play often but differently from other children. We will look at stages of play development and then consider how children with autism will play in these stages. Finally, we will consider how children with autism react uniquely to their environment and its objects. Parents, carers and teachers find their intuitive play skills don’t work and often opt out and leave their children to play alone. Therefore, this session will offer suggestions for how you can productively join them in their play yet also influence their development through play and enjoy the time together.
Autism, play and communication - Making Connections with Chris Barson
Speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) run through the middle of autism. Responding to them is job number one for play practitioners, parents and therapists. The building blocks of early communication start getting put into place from the moment we are born (and there is good evidence that they begin even before that!) So how does autism impact the development of speech, language and nonverbal communication? What’s the latest thinking? What works? This session will try to answer these questions and guide practitioners through:
Effective language learning through play
Adapting our communication to get the best fit for autism
Moving from functional communication to emotional connection
Creating Multi Sensory Magic with Richard Hirstwood
Richard dives into using multi sensory strategies, resources and ‘sensory on a shoestring’ ideas to create irresistible teaching and learning opportunities in your classroom and the sensory room! He shares ideas on how to link what you do in the classroom with what you do in the sensory room to create a cohesive sensory learning experience for your learners. He will also suggest that you think of your sensory room as a toolbox – identifying what you want to achieve in the space with your learner and choosing the best tool to achieve this. Spoiler – it’s not all of them at once!
Creating a positive behaviour culture in your classroom with Clive Smith
This session explores how to use sensory strategies and resources in your classroom to help reduce the impact of difficult/distressed or challenging behaviour on a pupil’s learning and those around them. Clive suggests classroom adaptations using tents/umbrellas to adapt a learning environment to quickly meet a pupil’s needs and create more permanent spaces to encourage the development of self-regulation skills. This very sensory approach will support you in creating a positive behaviour culture in your classroom.
Comic Strip Conversations and Social Stories with Chris Barson
Chris will start by looking at Comic Strip Conversations™ and how these stories help learners understand different social situations and feelings. Chris will share practical strategies to move from theory into practice with resources that support Conversations in the classroom and beyond. He’ll share examples of how technology can help to create Comic Strip Conversations™, but he won’t forget good old low-tech, either!
Chris’s session will continue by discussing social stories and how you can use them to help your neurodivergent learners navigate social situations confidently. He’ll share practical strategies for understanding the why behind social stories, explore the different types of stories, and show you how to create personalised stories for individual learners.
Sensory on a shoestring with Richard Hirstwood
Sensory on a shoestring tools complement your sensory approach to learning. These shoestring tools can be powerful motivators, attention-getters and story-makers and more!
And sensory tools don’t have to be expensive!
There are many things from pound shops and, of course, suppliers like Ikea/Tiger/Maplin, which can create engaging sensory sessions.
Remember! Matching sensory needs with cheap and cheerful tools means you will discover an easy way of engaging sensory learners further in their learning.
Understanding under and over-stimulation with Chris Barson
Learners with autism have different sensory experiences. Sometimes, their senses work too well, and sometimes, not well enough. They might struggle to understand what they are sensing, which can be confusing or scary. Why do autistic children spin, walk on tip-toe, cover their ears, and touch everything in reach? Often, these characteristics have a sensory ‘function’ for individuals. Exploring the possible ‘reasons why’ will help us understand our learners better.
So, it is essential to investigate how their sensory systems work in different environments. Luckily, many tools and checklists can help us profile individual sensory differences and difficulties.
This workshop will cover:
The sensory sensitivity differences and difficulties in autism Hyposensitivity
Hypersensitivity
‘Sensory seeking’ and ‘sensory avoiding’ behaviours
What can we do if sensory behaviours become a problem? Individual sensory profiles
Sensory audit for your school/classroom
Positive strategies
Protective strategies
Working on self-regulation
'Can I tempt you?' with Carol Allen
Our learners with autism often fixate on certain types of play or specific play activities. These form a safe place of predictable pleasure. Whilst respecting the need for this, this session will consider different types of play that form part of daily life. Is it possible to create a play diet? What would a taster menu of play activities look like? Should we move learners beyond their comfort zone when play is involved?
Sensory in the Curriculum with Carol Allen
Our sensory system is fundamental to our ability to learn. It is how we interact with our environment and receive information that we can process, consolidate and generalise into learning outcomes. It creates and strengthens new connections in the brain and develops language and motor skills that underpin access to the curriculum.
This session will focus on how a sensory curriculum offering effective sensory learning opportunities is crucial for our learners with severe or complex learning needs.
Play and Communication with Matt Laurie
This enjoyable session will expand upon the principles of Intensive Interaction to investigate how staff can use objects, props, toys, activities and games to find rapport and build relationships with the people they support. Through a series of games and social learning activities, staff will learn about the principles of play and how to become more playful people to make more connections with service users. The theory covered will include social pedagogy and playwork principles. The session will end with a short musical interaction session.
Sensory Play Opportunities with Richard Hirstwood
‘Play is something I do when they have stopped telling me what to do’ is a mantra for Richard. But how do we encourage engagement in play with the senses, how do we recognise the importance of play, and what is sensory play? The transition from play to learning is essential, and learners who are autistic need to play to learn. Richard will share lots of practical ideas and insights into sensory play. His session will be fun but with serious messages about why you should offer more sensory play in your classroom!