How to choose Positive Handling Training for your School

by positivehandling

May 16, 2021

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May 16, 2021

How to choose positive handling training for your school.

Positive handling is such a broad term and covers many different elements of how to positively manage behavior in a school and keep staff safe and deal with the unfortunate distress and frustration, sometimes even physical violence of some of our most vulnerable children.  It is no wonder that some senior leadership teams are a little unsure of what their options are or what they might be buying when they choose positive handling training for their school. 

We thought it might be useful for senior leaders, school business managers and others, if we did a deep dive into the subject and provide some ideas for senior leadership to use, to help their thinking when they go to select a positive handling provider.

What should I consider when booking positive handling training?

Here are the questions we are going to go through with you in this article:


Which staff should receive positive handling training?

One of the key questions you need to answer when you're thinking about positive handling is actually which staff at my school need to be trained, and how many places in a class do you need to get the training company to provide.

  • Which staff should receive positive handling training?
  • How many places are there in a positive handling training course?
  • How many staff should I train ?

There are a few options here that you might want to think about. Firstly, you may already have a specialist team at your school - sometimes called the ‘behavior team’. This would include your SENCo (sometimes SENDCo), your specialist Teaching Assistants who have duties with particular children. It might include your inclusion manager, your deputy heads who are involved with safeguarding or pastoral issues and so forth. Now, you have already assembled a list of people who very likely need this training.  

Your formal risk assessment process under Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety Regulations will have already identified if you need to address the risks of harmful behaviour or serious disruption happening at your school too, so A) remember that risk assessments are required by law and can be very helpful to guide your decision-making and B) where you have a properly-constructed Risk Assessment, you should follow its recommendations in order to keep everyone safe at your school.

How many staff should we train ?

In the past, some schools have opted for a whole-school training where every single member of staff is provided with positive handling training. This, on the face of it is a really appropriate way to ensure that when an incident happens at your school, then you have ensured that you have the best chance that the staff present will make the most appropriate decisions and response appropriately. 

However, there are some shortcomings with this approach, which have to do with the physical ability, the emotional condition, the preparedness, the experience of, and the ability and skills of the staff who might be put in that position. 

When you consider your whole school team it is good to think: are there members of the team that we think are not able to carry out positive handling interventions in the way that reflect our ethos and values the way we would want them to? And: Are there people in our staff team who, because of their nature or disposition may not respond positively and be able to cope with the pressures of a positive handling intervention?

Schools therefore use an approach (see the video below) which selects some member of their teams - who often have great fundamental skills and attitudes anyway - to get further training to specialise in managing these incidents.

If you want some more detail on “How Many staff should be trained in Positive Handling?” then you should watch our YouTube Video and read the Transcript of that video by following the link.

What are the Different Types of Positive Handling Training?

So what are the types of positive handling training and who would they help?

There are a number of different areas and topics within this broad topic, which, because it's such a broad one, we may need to consider.  

  • Which positive handling training format will suit my setting?
  • What level or depth of content should our positive handling training have?

The fundamental baseline for positive handling training at your school should be that any member of staff for whom it is foreseeable that they will be dealing with a child who becomes distressed or frustrated should have a very, very solid grounding in behavior and communication. 

Within this, staff members need to understand triggers for behavior. Those are the events, activities, interruptions and contexts that prevent your children from remaining calm, settled and feeling secure in your environment.

Next there is an increasingly important need to develop an understanding of trauma, which means the potential adverse childhood experiences that the children have had - their home context, their family context, the traumatic circumstances of their early years. 

Your team should understand cues, which are the ‘tells’ which inform the staff that a child is not coping at any given moment. Spotting these early can really help to head-off distressed behaviour and more serious incidents, so the 'holy grail of behaviour management is identifying if a child displays these indicators and then making sure the team know them and act on them.

All of these elements - the triggers, the cues and the trauma form the contextual premise of any behavior that we might be seeing in the school and this ability that your staff need - we call it ‘being Sherlock Holmes’ - is key to preventing the need for restrictive interventions.

What should we do about 'Restraint Reduction'?

Restraint Reduction is becoming a major focus for OFSTED and CQC inspectors.

There is a strong movement towards the reduction of restraint in services with all vulnerable people and before long it will be assumed that your governors, and SLT are 'on top of' a restraint reduction programme for your school. 

This involves the proper reporting, recording and tracking of incidents - with the active support of senior leadership and management.  This tracking and data-interrogation is done with a view to making sure that if we have children who are being exposed to physical interventions, that the incidents are being scrutinized and examined closely

Post-incident, there should be rigorous debriefing for staff.  Sometimes this is broken down into an 'immediate' staff debrief with the imperative of establishing everyone's safety just after an incident has concluded, and then a more reflective and insights-driven post-incident review which happens some (perhaps) days after the event, with suitable questions being asked about the changes needed to reduce the likelihood of the same kind f incident evolving in the same way again.

All of these actions have a common purpose of trying to ensure that the number of incidents that are happening with a given child are reducing, because we are increasingly focusing with our strategies and tactics on the causes of their distressed behavior and therefore, eliminating everywhere possible the triggers, contexts and situations in which they become so frustrated and distressed. 

We attempt as an organization to meet the needs of the child. This is the heart of restraint reduction programs, and it is increasingly important from the point of view of guidance and good governance that the processes of restraint reduction are woven into any positive handling program.

To read our case study and learn about significant restraint reduction outcomes we achieved with a recent project, please visit our Restraint Reduction page.

How can we help staff to make good Positive Handling decisions?

Training is key in helping your staff to develop several skill-sets.

  1. What to say and do to prevent situations from escalating, and then how to defuse and de-escalate situations when the child is nearing the 'point of no return'.
  2. Knowing when it is the appropriate time, and when it is NOT the appropriate time, for them to enter into a positive handling intervention.
  3. Knowing how to scale-up and scale-down their use of handling interventions appropriately to the situation.
  4. Having the skills to be effective in both of the above, and then explaining to another person why they made the right decisions and deployed the right tactics.

Extensive guidance exists from the Department of Education and a good training provider will be able to explain clearly -  in a way that the staff can practically use and understand - what the rules for positive handling and physical intervention are, whether in situations for their own self protection in a given incident, or whether as a team as they intervene to stop a child from harming themselves or others.

Staff need to understand their own duty of care - what is, and what is not expected of them and also the legal rules for when use of force is necessary and proportionate. You should be satisfied that your training provider actually understands these issues as an understanding of only the de-escalation theory, coupled with the techniques of holding, is not sufficient for your team to gain comfort that they can use their training safely.

Staff will need to be able to solve crisis-behaviour problems in live situations, as well as to break those incidents down after live encounters, when there needs to be an accurate recording and reporting of what happened during the incident .

This becomes paramount in order to help the restraint reduction process and to assist any person who is investigating the incident to understand clearly what happened, what decisions were made, what interventions happened, and the justification for them.

Should a training provider be able to help our School with Liability, Investigations and Due Diligence?

You should feel as if the training provider is a partner in this with you - that keeping children and staff safe at your school is your responsibility and their primary focus.

We had a HR Manager sit in on one of our training courses recently, because the service we went to help had unfortunately lost a couple of members of their team to disciplinary action, mainly due to poor decisions, made in tense, rapidly unfolding and uncertain situations in which they found themselves.

We thought that the HR manager’s attendance was a fantastic idea, because Positive Handling is a whole-organisation activity.  Incidents of holding cause ripple-effects which extend outwards to all of the children in the service, all of the staff in the service, the management, the board of governors and beyond (CQC, OFSTED, the Local authority).

The HR Manager who attended our session took 8 pages of notes in just 3 hours.

Several points covered in the session created “lightbulb” moments for her.  The deeper insights about confrontation and behaviour management that are discussed in a properly constructed training session can create clarity, where otherwise personal opinion or poorly-constructed arguments might seem “correct”.

We need to be careful that, when investigations are carried out, the person who is making decisions and judgements about the next steps for a complaint, allegation or accusation should have the elementary knowledge in the subject matter needed to find the key points which will help everyone find clarity and a resolution to the situation.

You probably want to work with a provider who is prepared to support you and your team if you run into legal difficulties related to positive handling.  

Over the years, we have been asked to clarify a number of our points of instruction, often when a head teacher is investigating an incident and could benefit from leaning on our expertise (perhaps months after the training) in order to help them to make a decision about how to proceed.

One example from Gerard, our Director of Training:

“I remember one Friday afternoon getting a call from a concerned head teacher in Birmingham who was looking into an incident where her staff had made the decision to close a door and to hold it shut when dealing with some very, very violent behaviour from a large and powerful child in their mainstream primary setting.

The team had decided that, to keep EVERYONE safe in their school, they needed to shut and hold a classroom door shut in order to contain very violent behaviour from the child, momentarily, so that they could assemble their team and begin to develop alternative strategies. 

The child had been assaulting staff, at times hurling objects at them and - when he was at the point of overpowering them - they employed a “containment” strategy to shut a door.

Gerard sent a 3,000-word letter to the head, explaining the decision-making framework (and how viable options are assessed) - which we teach learners in the Dynamis approach.  The response included the relevant points from the school’s own local authority’s policy on use of force which allowed for the measures taken on the day in question.

The head teacher was delighted with the support and relieved to have the insights from our team.

By the end of work on the monday, there were no further actions pending and the matter was put to rest.”

So, this example offers some insights into the proper relationship between training-provider and school.

  • Will the provider offer support to your SLT after the course?
  • Does the provider have the depth of insight and knowledge needed?
  • Do they instead have to call someone else? Who is that?
  • Will they appear in court if a case emerges?

Choosing a provider, you may want to take notice of their intellectual backing - accreditation level, books published, manuals available, trainer CPD, expert witness credentials and so on.  

The last thing your school wants is to lean on a 3-legged chair when the pressure of scrutiny, investigations and inspections is bearing down on your service.  Take the time to have a conversation with your trainer - do they have the personnel with gravitas for that level of scrutiny?  Who is that person?  Can you speak with them? Are they actively involved in the business you are commissioning the training from (ideally and owner-operator and not just a distant “certificate-mill”).

These issues are even more acute when you consider Train the Trainer provision! We will deal with that decision in another blog post, soon.

What are the appropriate Physical Skills in Positive Handling for your school?

You may wish to consider physical skills training for your staff, so that they have an appropriate and relevant set of physical skills for your setting, to help them to work as a team when needed,  to intervene physically, to stop a child from harming themselves or others. 

You can see that in our experience there are the “Common Scenarios” in which we believe your team will be in a “decisive moment” for the use of a physical intervention.

There are a number of different subsets of positive handling physical skills.  Some call these the “moves” or the “holds”.  Technically, another term used is “tactics”. Groups of tactics form around specific scenarios.

For example, you may wish your staff to understand how to protect themselves using what are called "breakaway" skills so that they can safely disengage from a child who is being violent, allowing them a brief window of opportunity to make their way to a safe place by breaking off from a child and withdrawing from a situation. 

In the real world, dealing with very frustrated and distressed children, withdrawal and breaking away, especially in a crowded school environment is not a viable option for staff. The teams may also need a 'system of work’ for restraint interventions.  This should be a pragmatic and useful way of working together to restrict a child's ability to harm themselves or others and to reduce risks and minimise harm for everyone. 

When a child becomes very frustrated, distressed, and poses a risk of violence and harm, it might be necessary for your team to restrict their ability to cause harm and this generally involves a small number of possible strategies.

One of the main strategies is to employ holding skills to restrain a child momentarily in order to bring a dangerous or risky situation to a safe conclusion.

What kind of Positive Handling techniques should my team use?

Not all holding techniques and strategies are the same. Whether you work, for example, in early years (i.e. a nursery provision / primary school KS1), or in a secondary environment, the physical strategies, and indeed the physical scenarios in which your team may have to use positive handling skills will be quite different. 

There are, for example, different approaches needed for:

  • Nursery and KS1
  • Mainstream Primary setting
  • Special Schools
  • Alternative Provision / PRU
  • Secondary Schools
  • College / Sixth Form environments
  • After-School clubs

You may wish to discuss with a provider how their tactics differentiate between the different scenarios that you feel your staff will encounter and how the tactics may need to be differentiated between, for example, the three-year-old in your nursery provision or the 8 year old student with ASD in your specialist unit, or indeed the 16 year old in your alternative provision.

A training provider should be able to clearly articulate (perhaps in a Zoom call or on a telephone conversation) their approach to these scenarios, how their underlying ethos and approach to de-escalation and restraint reduction works, and what tactics they recommend as appropriate to those encounters.  If you can’t get detailed answers on these topics, you may be dealing with a provider who does not have school expertise and is merely selling an off-the-shelf “cookie-cutter” restraint training programme - buyer beware!

IMPORTANT:

There are specific techniques which have been found to have a greater risk of causing physical and psychological harm, including floor-control techniques (with the child being held in prone or supine positions, flat on the floor) and techniques which impact on breathing or the airway (neck holds, 'basket' holds and suchlike).

Senior leaders would do well to ask about any higher-risk interventions which the provider teaches, and to consider the answer they receive from the provider. It is becoming increasingly unacceptable to expose children (and their carers) to practices which would expose them to physical harm or psychological trauma, and a provider should be able to demonstrate that they embody this in their training programmes.

One example of this is that some training providers will include holding methods within their repertoire of tactics which are specifically designed to cause pain to the person the tactic is being applied to.  This was a feature of methods used to control violent adult offenders in detention services some time ago, but is seen as anachronistic, inappropriate and ineffective in most progressive systems now.

Should my team be taught more restrictive techniques for positive handling?

In some specialist settings, there may be a need for a higher level of control tactics and restraint techniques, which ordinarily we would not need to see in a school environment. Although very rare, there are some settings, for example, in special schools with particularly vulnerable and traumatized children or in ASD settings with children whose behavior is particularly difficult to manage and which can become incredibly difficult for staff to manage, necessitating the use of highly restrictive techniques. 

These should be uncovered during a detailed training needs analysis and a deep level of discussion with your training provider before you bring those kinds of interventions into your setting.

But it is good to note that those kinds of more in-depth, more thorough interventions are available and a good training provider will be able to teach your staff how to do more intrusive interventions safely, if your risk assessments and governance deem them to be necessary.

What should be the focus of your team's positive handling training?

As in many sectors, there are a variety of approaches to meeting the needs of the customer! 

Some training providers will provide one single training package which is designed to - by itself - meet the needs of any environment. 

This type of training is rigid a kind of “off the shelf” training approach and it may, for example, mandate that staff have to go through a two day package. 

There may be advantages with this in terms of the legal standing of such a package i.e. it covers all the legal angles from every direction, for every setting. The disadvantage is that your busy team need to engage with content and skills which don’t immediately fit their current challenges, your ethos or your children.

Many schools simply don't have the time or a genuine need for this (some say ‘bloated’) approach to positive handling training.  Perhaps they look for something leaner and more surgical as a training intervention.

It may be that staff find that the theory portions of some trainings are actually overly theoretical ("how does that concept help me on monday morning with my child in my classroom?") or that the concepts and training are too vague (‘stay calm and de-escalate the situation’ - I knew that already!) to be of meaningful help.

So one other thing to take note-of will be the balance of time spent between the theory portions (talking about de-escalation) and practical activities (practicing de-escalation in scenario-driven tasks with role-players). You could ask about the ratio of theory to practical to get a feel from your training provider about this - the higher the ratio of scenario-specific practice in-vivo, the better your team will benefit, especially if the provider commits to tight, individualised feedback and safe practice.

If you see that there is more than 50% of presentation time and group discussions and instructor talk-time, then you may find that your team will struggle to transfer this trainer-centric or curriculum-focussed type of training to the kinds of rapidly-unfolding, tense and uncertain incidents which prompted you to call the training provider in the first place!

We hear from teams that overly theroretical, rigid-style training doesn't feel useful or pragmatic to them in dealing with the challenges they face with their children.

On the other hand, if your training provider talks about conducting a Training Needs Analysis, for example gathering specific information about your school, your staff, your children, your ethos and your specific problems around risky behaviour, then your confidence can begin to rise.

Likewise, if the provider also talks about focusing on practice and incorporating your scenarios into the training content, to match your training gaps and the needs of the team, then you can be more confident that the provider is concerned about really moving the needle in terms of changing outcomes in your school. This concept is called ‘ensuring knowledge transfer’ and it is the only reason you should ever pay a training provider!

What kind of formats are available for my positive handling training?

Many of the knowledge and understanding and concepts needed for the appropriate use of positive handling can be delivered as a fundamental bedrock of understanding pre-training -  which in theory shortens the amount of contact time required with the trainer. 

With this pre-training under their belts, when the trainer visits with your team and gets them into a training session, the trainer can more quickly bring the focus of the session on to your team's specific needs for the specific children you are working with.

So these seem to be the two divergent approaches to provision of training. One is a more tailored and surgical approach, with more specific content to answer your current challenges. The other type of training has a more long-term development view, is a more rigid programme of content designed to answer all possible future questions, and can have a bigger manual of content to get through, requiring more investment of time and resources for your school.

Remember, you may wish to investigate with your provider, how they teach the knowledge and understanding and concepts versus how they teach and ensure good transfer of the practical scenario based skills that your team need at your school. 

It's a good idea to look at the time on tasks. So if a training provider can provide you with a scheme of work, this will tell you how much practical training time with hands-on activities that the sessions are likely to have - when it comes to physical skills, this becomes very important.

How much time do my staff need to learn Positive Handling skills?

When considering the learning of physical skills, and particularly when a novice begins to learn these skills, it is important that they have enough repetitions. Repetition of new skills is really important so that the skills can bed-in and become as automatic as possible. 

When it comes to dealing with distress behavior and violence, and these high stress incidents and encounters that we are talking about in positive handling, it is really important that staff have sufficient repetition and sufficient exposure to decision making and problem solving in reasonably live and intense environments, so that in a real situation, the effects of stress, the adrenaline, which occurs and the suddenness and urgency of the situation doesn't render them less capable and less performant in the real situation. 

So one way to know how effective a training course will be for your team is how much actual practice time they will spend in-context using the new skills that they're learning, in order to overcome the effects of stress.

How long does Positive Handling training take?

There are two day formats, which generally break down as one full day of theory and knowledge aspects, plus one full day of physical skills and legal aspects.

However, if you are confident that you are providing your team with good in-school training and induction about behavior and communication and your restraint reduction program is well constructed and it's working, then you may decide that a single day of training, which focuses on the practical aspects of these last resort interventions, is the best option for you.

In this case, you will have assumed that your people are good at de-escalation, that they understand behavior, they understand triggers and so on, and your focus will be on having them learn practical skills. 

There are ways of providing aspects of that training in an online format, pre training course, which will help to load up the staff and have them ready for learning when the training instructor arrives at your school. And this is how some providers, including ourselves have pioneered the use of blended training programs, which are for 40 to 50% online based, plus 50 to 60% practical skills based scenario driven training to embed the skills within your staff team.

So there are these different formats two days, one full day, one half day, which can be delivered as a morning and afternoon, or even a Twilight session. 

What time of the year is best for Positive Handling training?

Schools have allocated training days for teachers throughout the year. These are called inset days or CPD days, and there is a huge amount of competition for training to fill these slots. The problem with the inset days is that because they often happen at the start of the term, teachers will have various demands on their time, including setting up their new classrooms and getting ready for the term ahead. And this often competes with the need to attend training.

Also, you may find that there are issues on the supply side, that is to say an issue with the availability of competent and professional Positive Handling trainers. 

Many schools across the country will have their inset days on the same day and it is simply impossible for the training providers (especially the good ones) to cover all of the inset days at the same time, to the same quality. 

So it may be better for you to look for a day, a couple of weeks into term, which is convenient for your team to attend the training. Even specialist trainers are more likely to be available and can come to your school in a morning (9am start) or an afternoon (12.30 start) or an evening Twilight (starting at 15.30 for example) to deliver the specialist training. This is often combined with the online provision of the knowledge, understanding and key concepts part of the training.

One other element of this 'picking the right time' is that often schools will call a training provider when they have been informed that they have a 'tricky customer' joining their school in the next term.  In these cases, where it is well-established that you can expect to be dealing with very difficult behaviours in the next term, to get your team the training in advance of the change in scene which is expected.

However, it may be important not to do that too far ahead of time, as skills and concepts learned in May, will be somewhat faded by the 5th of September!

Anecdotally, we hear a lot about these 'difficult incoming cases' and in fact, because of the change of scene, the new faces, the new classmates and all of the great efforts of staff to welcome child into school, there is sometimes a sea-change in their behaviour and demeanour in school.  Fingers crossed!

Can we get positive handling training online? 

First - let's talk about this and get some clarity: the vast majority of normal people can not learn physical intervention skills for the first time if they attempt to do so online, by watching and copying some moves 'in the air'.  For this reason, it will almost always be necessary (except in extreme situations where skills are needed literally overnight, in-between incidents) for a trainer to be in the same room with your people, as they practice the moves (tactics) on other live humans. 

Now, that point taken - there are numerous topics which can be taught online, mostly involving fundamental legal points and those which assist staff, as a fundamental underlying principle, for example,  to more easily make a left-or-right decision in a situation which faces them.

There are essentially three types of online or distance learning for positive handling when we consider these fundamental topics. 

The first level of distance-learning which evolved was the type of pre-course-learning option where a training provider would send you a PDF of written material and ask you to get your staff to read the material and have your SLT sign-off that you have done this prior to the trainer arriving. Essentially this form of distance learning or pre-course learning was a very passive intervention with some pre-reading involved. 

The next level of online training is where the provider may have some powerpoint slides (ugh!) or (better) video-based training available online. This can vary from somebody reading the PowerPoint slides on a video towards something like a multimedia presentation, including video of the instructor presenting the material, with various graphics which have been developed for positive handling concepts mixed with some video of incidents and the relevant guidance. This is the second type of simple online training. 

The third type of online training, becoming more common with serious providers, is where presentation videos  and other kinds of resources are placed into a virtual learning environment which includes knowledge-check quizzes and activities to help the learner to explore the material, engage with is and therefore retain and assimilate it, probably better than simple reading or flipping through a powerpoint would.

Not all online training is the same and you would do well to ask how a provider is making efforts to ensure that learners are engaging in their pre-course online learning and that there is some knowledge-share / knowledge-check assurance built into the process. In an ideal situation, you could get an individual breakdown of all the learning one of your team has done, how much time they spent on the units of learning, what quizzes they passed, what scores they got and when they passed the online training course.  

The reason for this is that in the event of an adverse incident, the records of training become important and so the ability to report on the activity and achievement of an individual learner becomes critical to the rigour of your training outcomes.

How much does positive handling training cost?

The first thing to say about this is that you should see examples of how much it costs to NOT have positive handling training for your staff, if they are facing the risk of physical violence from a child or children at your school.

In 2020 for example, NASUWT secured a £155,000 payout for a primary school teacher in Cheshire who sustained a life-long injury to her hand and wrist, having been assaulted by a child in her classroom.

Many stories over the years support the need to keep staff and children safe:

We estimate that the cost of one day of positive handling training (or a blended day) with a qualified provider probably ranges from £1,000 to £1,400 per training day.  

By our analysis, anything less than this level of investment would suggest that the provider is operating in the capacity of a sole-trader (a freelancer) and may not have the volume of business to independently sustain the research, medical risk assessment, accreditation standards, quality assurance and, let’s face it, the office management capacity to be a reliable, long-term safe pair of hands for your training budget.

If you face an adverse incident at your school, you will want to lean on a partner who has all of these things in place, and more.

Smaller providers can be experts, and you may find one locally to you whose rates are lower than some more-established companies, but it is worth asking about accreditation, about the CPD being undertaken by the trainer and the general level of activity of the provider.  If the provider isn’t active in your sector, with customers like you, then you may just be paying for them to learn about you, rather than paying them to bring best-practice advice to you! Be ready to satisfy yourself that they are active in the sector - perhaps even ask for references of schools like yours,  local to you, who they have helped?

But let’s look at the pricing again - what does it mean when the training is £1,200 per-day?  There are various ways that a day-rate may be more expensive than you first thought.  

Here are some considerations:

  • what is the limit on class size for the stated day-rate? We have seen providers with maximum class sizes of 8, 12 or 16 for positive handling.  Sometimes you can pay per-learner for additional learners, sometimes if you go over the maximum, you need to book another full course!
  • how many people can the class accommodate, maximum?  You should consider the effects of group size on learning quality.  The more people in the room per instructor, the greater the effect on learning, and vice-versa.
  • is there a minimum number of learners needed for a class?  If you have just a handful of learners, you might want to consider inviting a team from a neighbouring school to join your training event, to mitigate against costs and enhance the training day.
  • what happens if I need to book more than one group of learners?  Does the cost multiply in a straight line, or is there a sliding scale of costs once we have a programme rolling?
  • how much does it cost to add another person to the class?   Some providers might let you add learners at a per-person cost.
  • does the provider charge VAT?   VAT is a feature of doing business with bigger, more established providers.  Smaller (sole-trader) providers may not charge VAT but may also be a riskier proposition.
  • does the provider charge mileage expenses? Some providers will have a higher day rate but provide their training as an “all in” price.  Others will have a base-price plus mileage.  Both are legitimate (good positive handling trainers are in demand and travel A LOT!) but you might want clarity on what your costs are going to be in a Total Investment quote.  Always ask for a total cost quotation or terms and conditions before confirming.
  • does the provider need to charge overnight expenses for a travelling instructor?   This is also a legitimate cost request which may be added to your invoice.  Again, popular Positive Handling trainers travel a LOT and in order to keep them fresh, to provide great training for your team, a provider may have rules about travelling distances and overnight expenses which they should be happy to discuss with you and include (where needed) in your estimates.

You’re probably going to feel most comfortable with a provider who makes the investment model for your positive handling as transparent and reliable as possible, considering your needs.

What should I consider when booking positive handling training?

These are the questions we worked through 


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