Consultancy Support
Our team is continually developing our practice in response to emerging needs within education and across our schools.
To support our schools, we provide consultancy-based advice across all areas of SEND, offering either strategic guidance on whole school priorities or greater depth involvement through our project‑based work.
What do we mean by consultancy support?
Consultancy support involves working collaboratively with schools to apply psychological knowledge in meaningful, practical ways.
Schools can draw on our expertise to inform any aspect of their development planning, considering whole‑school priorities, policies or curriculum development.
Consultancy support ensures that schools can:
- Apply psychological perspectives to shape strategic priorities and development planning, embedding psychologically informed practice across whole‑school polices, systems and culture.
- Ensure all approaches are informed by current understanding of child and adolescent development, learning, wellbeing and inclusion.
- Strengthen whole‑school approaches to SEND, ensuring consistent, inclusive practice across a whole school.
Consultancy questions our schools have asked:
- What does a curriculum that fosters intrinsic motivation and meaningful engagement in learning look like?
- How can classroom approaches be designed to promote independence, self‑regulation and lifelong learning skills?
- How can a school’s ethos and values be consistently embedded so that all children and families experience a strong sense of belonging?
- How should schools approach staff wellbeing in a sustainable and impactful way?
- How can schools strengthen home–school relationships and increase positive, collaborative parental engagement?
- What does research suggest about knowledge‑based and skills‑based curricula, and how can schools make informed decisions when designing their curriculum balance?
Our Projects
We offer project‑based support for schools and settings that wish to focus on a specific area of development in greater depth.
Schools can work in partnership with us to co-develop a bespoke project aligned with their whole‑school development plan or select from our existing projects, which have been designed in response to current and emerging needs across our schools.
Our current projects are:
Reading for All
Our ‘Reading for All’ project equips staff with a comprehensive toolkit that brings together research‑informed TRAINING, practical COACHING and targeted ASSESSMENTS to implement robust STRATEGIES and INTERVENTIONS to strengthen reading outcomes across your setting.
We support staff to identify underlying barriers to reading, apply an evidence‑based intervention and use effective classroom strategies. Through training, we share what the research tells us about high‑quality reading instruction and the limitations of many commonly used reading schemes. Our coaching then helps staff embed this learning in practice, delivering structured, evidence‑based approaches that improve children and young people’s reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension, whilst monitoring progress to determine whether further assessment or support is needed.
As part of the project, we complete assessments to create individual learning profiles that inform classroom strategies and guide targeted intervention. We also incorporate advice on assistive technologies and how these tools can support children and young people to access and apply their learning in the classroom.
Integrated SEND Provisions
In response to the increasingly diverse and complex needs of children within mainstream settings, many schools are establishing or developing their own integrated SEND provisions or in‑house resource units.
Central to the support requested by our schools is the development of workforce capacity to ensure their staff have the skills, confidence and resources to effectively set up, run and evidence the impact of their integrated specialist classrooms.
Therefore, our support provides a strategic pathway for developing high‑quality SEND provision, offering tailored guidance, embedded training, coaching and modelling to help schools build sustainable and inclusive practice grounded in evidence of what works.
Nurturing Schools
‘Nurturing Schools with Waite Psychology’ is a strand of our service and the umbrella under which we deliver our work to support the social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs of children and young people, as well as the emotional wellbeing of everyone within school settings.
The SEMH needs of children and young people are becoming increasingly complex and schools are having to respond to challenges that require both specialist knowledge and relational, nurturing approaches. These approaches help pupils feel safe, connected and emotionally regulated which, in turn, enables them to engage meaningfully with their learning.
In response to this growing need, our service has long prioritised SEMH support and formalised this work through our ‘Nurturing Schools’ project. Several members of our team are Attachment Aware and Trauma Informed Specialists and have specialist therapeutic or therapist-level training, alongside their extensive experience as Educational Psychologists or Specialist Teachers.
Through the ‘Nurturing Schools’ project, we aim is to build staff confidence and skills, deepen understanding and knowledge, and embed nurturing, relational practice across whole settings.
Strategic Support
We can support schools at the strategic level to devise a Relational and Regulation Policy and embed whole school approaches and practices. This can include:
- Completing a whole school policy review, identifying strengths and a phased action plan, working towards increasing relational practices across a whole setting.
- Providing ongoing consultancy support on policy development or phased action plans.
- Delivering whole school training on key areas such as The Development and Neuroscience of Emotional Regulation, Emotion Coaching, The 4Rs and the PACE Approach.
Coaching Support
We can deliver coaching sessions for small groups of staff on:
- How to write a Regulation Plan for a child or young person.
- How to implement psychoeducational sessions for children or young people on different aspects of wellbeing, relationships and emotional regulation.
- How to implement our regulation steps: ‘Calm, Talk, Listen, Fix It and Finish’.
- How to implement practical tools and interventions such as sociograms, growth mindset workshops or the ‘Circle of Friends’.
Support for Groups or for Individual Children and Young People
The delivery of our projects combines consultancy support with staff training and coaching, alongside the implementation of assessment and evaluation measures to monitor impact and inform ongoing development.
Our support at this level enables us to work closely with groups or individual children and young people, addressing specific needs whilst strengthening relationships, building staff skills and promoting emotional wellbeing. This can include:
- Supporting at the whole class or group level to improve classroom relationships and promote belonging, including through approaches such as Working on What Works (WoWW).
- Supporting in crisis situations through facilitating problem‑solving consultations using the ‘Circles of Adults’ model to co-create action plans with staff, alongside Regulation Plans for those at immediate risk of school exclusion.
- Supporting children and young people with Emotional Barriers to School Attendance (EBSA), alongside their families and schools, through the development of collaborative action plans informed by individual formulations of the barriers to attendance, enabling everyone to work together towards re‑engagement in learning.
- Supporting schools to deliver our ‘Roots to Wings Intervention.
