Secure Base: Attachment, Caregiving & The Path to Resilience – Advanced (Zoom)

Every child needs a reliable, nurturing presence to develop trust, emotional regulation, and self-worth. For children who have experienced trauma, abuse, or neglect, this foundation is missing and must be intentionally built by the adults around them. Grounded in decades of research and endorsed in government care policy (Care Matters), this course equips childcare professionals with an evidence-based framework to provide that missing foundation.

By reframing challenging behaviours as non-verbal communication of unmet needs, this training equips caregivers to build safety, promote resilience, and achieve positive developmental outcomes across every stage of a child's care journey.

Key Learning Highlights

• Principles of Attachment & Brain Development: Understand how secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganised attachment patterns form and how healthy bonding shapes neural pathways for emotional regulation and resilience.
• The Impact of Neglect & Adverse Experiences: Examine how chronic stress and trauma distort a child's internal working models, creating hypervigilance, shame, emotional dysregulation, and mistrust.
• Challenging Behaviour as Communication: Learn to reframe aggression, withdrawal, lying, stealing, and controlling behaviours as survival strategies, responding with therapeutic co-regulation rather than reaction.
• Master the 5 Dimensions of Caregiving: Implement the core pillars of the Secure Base Model in daily interactions:
  1. Availability (helping the child to trust)
  2. Sensitivity (helping the child to manage feelings through co-regulation)
  3. Acceptance (building self-esteem and separating worth from behaviour)
  4. Co-operation (helping the child feel effective and gain agency)
  5. Family Membership (helping the child belong without erasing their heritage)
• Practical Recording & Mapping Tools: Utilise the Secure Base Mapping Tool to chart the child's progress systematically, evidence caregiving practice for court or review reports, and maintain child-centred records.
• Service-Wide Implementation & Assessment: Discover how to embed the framework across foster care, adoption, residential, and kinship services to improve matching, ongoing capacity assessments, and supervision.
• Reflective Practice & Self-Care: Explore how caregivers' own attachment histories influence practice, and learn strategies to manage vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and rejection.

Why Choose This Course?

Profound healing happens through attuned, consistent relationships. Backed by over 18 years of longitudinal research, this training offers practical, real-world scenario guidance that turns everyday moments, like bedtime routines, homework conflicts, and birthday celebrations, into powerful opportunities for developmental repair.

Who Should Attend: Foster Carers, Adopters, Kinship Carers, Residential Child Care Workers, Supervising Social Workers, SENCOs, and Pastoral Support Staff.

Format: This is a live training session through Zoom. It includes taught sections, small group work, work in pairs, and whole group discussions.

Hand-outs & Certificates: Downloadable course notes and certificates of attendance are provided.