Testimonials

From nursery, childcare, school and FE settings across the UK, from online webinars, face-to-face sessions and conference workshops, the comments below are all from evaluations written by previous training participants.

"Such an informative professional journey shared through the art of storytelling. It kept me engaged and interested throughout. Very thought-provoking and has recharged my ethos in keeping positive during these turbulent changes within early years."

The course has really inspired me and was delivered in a brilliant way. I found many aspects of the course were in line with my own professional journey. It was a really easy to follow early years journey of improvement. Well displayed visuals with brilliant further reading suggestions. The story of Nicky's own professional journey made it relatable due to our nursery being on its own journey. I usually write a list of books to look for during a training session, but I have every one of the books mentioned on my bookshelf. What was amazing was how they all tied together in the training for me….Nicky joined all the dots for me finally. Thank you. Great course! Very interesting and I will definitely use this in my practice. It has inspired me to continue to use my CPD time to engage in training which can help me better understand emotion coaching. Fantastic course! Thank you. I too have been on a journey over the years and have discovered connecting with the children on an emotional level is the foundation of everything else. Would be lovely to get the whole team on board, that’s the really hard part. Such an informative professional journey shared through the art of storytelling. It kept me engaged and interested throughout. Very thought-provoking and has recharged my ethos in keeping positive during these turbulent changes within early years. My setting is aiming to change over to these kind of strategies, it was lovely to hear to about your journey as we are going through ours. I have a load of points to take to my setting and discuss with them all and I am really looking forward to sharing this with them. Hopefully aiming to get everyone on the training courses so we are all working from the same page! I loved the storytelling approach. It made me curious and wanting to hear more and at the same time thinking about my own place of work and our practice. I will change the behaviourist approach...and look at the emotions of the children rather than the behaviours. We will focus on having more areas for the children to choose to use for as calm down spaces.

"What can I say? I was totally blown away by the story and presentation. Thankyou so much. I really cannot wait to share this with the staff team. This has given me the language that my team will understand and be interested in using with the children."

I was totally engaged in this wonderful session from start to finish. The story and information shared already started to answer questions about my setting. We are in the process of setting up a wellbeing room for our children which they have been completely involved with. I can’t wait to share this story with my staff team and know it will help improve how we support the children in our care. I thought the whole session was very interesting and informative. It definitely makes you think about your own practice and how I could adapt to support children's emotions. It definitely supports reflection on practice and learning how to change, and the benefits of doing so. Thank you! What can I say? I was totally blown away by the story and presentation. Thankyou so much. I really cannot wait to share this with the staff team. This has given me the language that my team will understand and be interested in using with the children. This training was amazing Nicky! I have learned so much in this first session and am feeling so inspired to begin the change journey in my setting. Thankyou! I am going to go into work and remove the star jar in the playroom first thing in the morning! I will now focus on breathing, recognizing and labelling emotions…with a more refined focus. Thank you. I had already started to notice the issues behind our own Golden Stars being used as a reward system and had started to realise this was not the answer. Having scrapped stickers due to their lack of intrinsic motivation I think I was clinging onto something more to get staff to notice the positive behaviours. I can now go back with more of an evidence based approach to staff with a clearer reason to ditch out last reward/sanction strategy and move forward. Thankyou.

"I found the course to be an instant lightbulb moment where I could correct my current practice to support the emotional resilience of the children I have within my care...I feel empowered to implement this new thinking into my practice."

Amazing! Nicky was extremely knowledgeable and easy to listen to. She explains everything concisely using easy to understand language, making everything easier to process and imagine in practice. The course was very insightful and thought-provoking in the ways to support children's emotions. The course has provided me with brilliant strategies. I now implement and use these useful tools within the playroom everyday. South Lanarkshire Council: Early Learning Unit Manager Nicky is a phenomenal and inspiring trainer! She speaks from the heart with understanding, empathy and compassion. She tailored the training to the needs of our team, first finding out where they were on their journey as educators and then meeting them at that point to ensure that the course was able to meet their needs. The course content was extremely relatable as Nicky used her own professional practice experiences of using Emotion Coaching in an early years setting, providing examples of her past approaches to support understandings of the difference between behaviour management and nurture. South Lanarkshire Council: Early Learning Unit Practitioner This was such a captivating and engaging session. From start to finish this course was absolutely amazing! Nicky presents the training with such an easy to follow manner. She really helps you understand how to put your learning into practice to support the children. A BIG BIG Thankyou Nicky! I was hooked from the very beginning! North Lanarkshire Council: Balmalloch Nursery Class Lead Practitioner This course was excellent in every possible way. Nicky was captivating and engaging for all of the team, who thoroughly enjoyed the training. She was knowledgeable and it was clear to see she was passionate about the training session. It was especially great as Nicky had a working knowledge of Emotion Coaching in an early years setting and could therefore provide really beneficial examples of how to implement this in practice. Glasgow City Council: Lamlash Nursery School Headteacher This was a fabulous course and so well delivered. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and extremely informative course and has inspired our staff team to read more about the subject. Thankyou for the very practical examples and resources such as the visual emotion regulation card. This course has made me reflect on my own practice and sharing what I have learned will have such a positive impact on the children and their families. Thank you Nicky! North Lanarkshire Council: Shotts Family Learning Centre Manager As a staff team we thoroughly enjoyed this course. We discussed it as a team after the session and were inspired by all the points of learning. We discussed how we can reflect on our own practice and see areas for improvement in our interactions. This training will be embedded in our ethos, vision and values here at our family learning centre. Nicky was a great presenter, passionate and motivated. We could have listened to her all day! Thanks again Nicky! South Lanarkshire Council: Calderside Nursery Practitioner I found it very interesting to learn how emotions can stem from before even being born, and how the way emotions are dealt with at a young age can affect later in life. As I move forward in practice I will now change my approach to helping children cope with their emotions. Love what you are doing Nicky and it is so helpful to practitioner development. South Lanarkshire Council: Calderside Nursery Practitioner Such a good course! It was engaging and relevant to current practice, driven by practitioner experience and feel understood by real life examples. I am going to change my approach to managing behaviours as I previously try to fix everything. I have learned how to explain emotions to the children at their developmental stage and will now introduce more emotional literacy into my practice South Lanarkshire Council: Calderside Nursery Manager I found it helpful that the presenter already had a great knowledge about early years care and education! It definitely helped me reflect on the interactions that we have daily with children in our care. would definitely like to take part in more training and and discussed with the presenter about how we can inform and start to educate parents on this topic. I really enjoyed listening to the presentation and look forward to using and supporting staff in using some strategies that we discussed. Thankyou for coming to Calderside and I hope to see you back very soon! South Lanarkshire Council: Calderside Nursery Practitioner This course made me look at my own upbringing. I will now use language to help children identify their feelings. I found it very interesting and helpful to look at how to say the emotions. I will be using this approach to support the children. I loved it and will be more conscious of my own approach to situations. North Lanarkshire Council: Wishaw Family Learning Centre Practitioner It was helpful to learn about the ways to intervene before an incident and the way to approach children after an incident such as biting. North Lanarkshire Council: Wishaw Family Learning Centre Practitioner I learned about approaches children can use to help regulate their emotions and recognise them. It was helpful to have practical examples and approaches children can use and interesting to focus on how to approach non-verbal communication and how I use my body language to help a child feel safe North Lanarkshire Council: Wishaw Family Learning Centre Practitioner I found it so interesting to when discussing when the child is unregulated how the brain is functioning. In my practice I will now be more aware about reading children’s responses in their bodies and trying to understand what responses they need from me . North Lanarkshire Council: Wishaw Family Learning Centre Practitioner This course helped me to see how to help children with how to approach their feelings and how to regulate their own feelings and emotions. I will use these ideas and strategies to use in the playroom. I will be taking more time in situations and wait for the responses from the children to support them. North Lanarkshire Council: Wishaw Family Learning Centre Practitioner I realise now how I have come across some of the things that were spoken about and how I can deal with it differently. I will change my approach to the child’s emotions showing them that I have emotions too and model regulation n for them. North Lanarkshire Council: Wishaw Family Learning Centre Lead Practitioner The graphics in the presentation made the very complex ideas of brain development easy to understand and relate to. I plan now to work alongside staff to encourage the team to give peer to peer feedback when they see good examples of emotion coaching. I will also further develop experiences and spaces to reduce children’s ‘threat’ levels with the aim to minimise behaviours as a result of big emotions. North Lanarkshire Council: Wishaw Family Learning Centre Practitioner Nicky provided a new perspective on handling children’s emotions and explained beneficial strategies to help the staff team support this. I am going to now model how to show my own emotions to children, such as modelling for children when an adult is overwhelmed, taking a few deep breaths and returning to calm. North Lanarkshire Council: Wishaw Family Learning Centre Lead Practitioner This was so helpful. The reminder that all behaviour is communication and by first addressing the emotion behind the behaviour etc this allows the child to feel safe and understood and hopefully then provides a positive teaching opportunity on methods the children can use when they are experiencing big emotions of anger/ sadness/ fear. I thought the emotion coaching training was very insightful and I am eager to develop this approach with the children. This will be especially helpful when more challenging behaviours are displayed and having that understanding going forward is really helpful to be thinking of the emotion behind the behaviour first. It makes so much sense. North Lanarkshire Council: Wishaw Family Learning Centre Practitioner Nicky linked her own practice experiences to those in our setting and this was so helpful. This training will make me think about the language I use and how best to approach situations in the future. North Lanarkshire Council: Windmill Nursery Practitioner It was so helpful to learn how there’s more ways to understand and communicate and to acknowledge when a child is expressing their emotions. In practice I will focus on recognising the child’s emotions and approach in the correct manner to retain a calm environment and to allow the child to approach us when they are ready and feel safe to do so North Lanarkshire Council: Windmill Nursery Practitioner It was very helpful that Nicky was referring to our practice and children in our setting, gaining support to use throughout our setting. The 6 steps of engaging with children displaying their emotions is something I will now be using in practice. North Lanarkshire Council: Windmill Nursery Practitioner I found the course most beneficial. I particularly felt that the training being compared to my current practice enabled me to have a better insight as how to put my new thinking into practice. I found the course to be an instant lightbulb moment where I could correct my current practice to support the emotional resilience of the children I have within my care . I think having the approach of supporting the emotions rather than having any focus on the behaviour to be very purposeful. I feel empowered to implement this new thinking into my practice. Thank you very much for the training it helped me look at it a whole different way and developed my practice. North Lanarkshire Council: Windmill Nursery Practitioner Nicky presented the course very well and made it easy to understand. I am now hoping to try using the stages of regulating emotions in our establishment. Nicky was professional and her delivery of the course was peer oriented, using her own experience of the highs and lows of her own career path settled me into the session. The session coming from her own experiences and embedded practice and successes was motivating.

"This was a very thought-provoking training session focusing on observation of children's learning. The course has led me to question our current systems and planning and to take a fresh look at child-led learning, ensuring observations are high quality and purposeful."

This whole session was fantastic and my whole team found the training so relevant. It encouraged real reflection and thought on how we observe and plan for our children, and also how we can involve the child's whole community of support to gather a true picture of the child and be able to support their learning and development Thankyou so much Nicky! Inverclyde Council: Head of Gibshill Children's Centre Nicky was absolutely fantastic. She was so friendly and approachable as a person. As a facilitator she was very organised and had so much knowledge that she was happy to share. She was able to speak and share experiences from academic research and from her own practice. Thankyou Nicky! The session has given us so much to think about! Inverclyde Council: Early Years Education and Childcare Officer Nicky was fabulous! She is so experienced and easy to listen to. She shared clear views, reasons and ideas for how play and observation can be improved in practice. It was a great session and everyone really enjoyed the videos and the discussions. Thankyou. Inverclyde Council Early Years Education and Childcare Officer Thankyou! This was such an excellent course on observation in practice. I have come away with so many brilliant ideas for practice. It was amazing! I love the idea of involving the child, their friends and their family in the whole observation process. It will be much more holistic now! North Lanarkshire Council: St. Stephen's Primary School ELC Practitioner This was a very thought-provoking training session focusing on observation of children's learning. The course has led me to question our current systems and planning and to take a fresh look at child-led learning, ensuring observations are high quality and purposeful. Thankyou very much indeed Nicky. North Lanarkshire Council: St Stephen's Primary School ELC Lead Practitioner Nicky was so informative and passionate about what she spoke about. She was great to listen to with a very positive approach. The session was really clear and so well prepared. It has opened up lots of opportunities for discussions in the team about how we approach children's learning in our setting. North Lanarkshire Council: St Stephen's Primary School Principal Teacher This was a fabulous input to support the development of play throughout our school. Focusing on values-led observation was fascinating reflecting a holistic picture of the child from multiple perspectives. This was a very well planned and informative course that will improve our practice. North Lanarkshire Council: St Kevin's Primary School Teacher Another excellent course from Nicky. I really enjoyed it and found it very thought-provoking. It has really got me reflecting on practice. I know I can absolutely take forward what I have learned about observation on this session today. Thankyou North Lanarkshire Council: St Kevin's Primary School ELC Practitioner This fabulous course has really helped me to understand how to develop a more holistic approach to observations. It will help me improve my questions skills and to observe and record more objectively in practice. Thank you Nicky! North Lanarkshire Council: St Kevin's Primary School Teacher This course was so interesting. It has really made me reflect on how child-led we actually are. I can see lots of areas where we can improve our practice now using these brilliant ideas Nicky shared with us. I have a much better understanding of how to make observations meaningful for children's learning. Thankyou.

"I love that Nicky comes with the lived experience and shares this. This session gave me lots to consider and think about how to improve my practice. It was very informative and thought provoking, making me think about my own practice and how I can improve the way staff see and think of change."

Relationships first. This is how I approach everything with the children, so now I need to put more effort into doing this with my colleagues too. I'm going to find my patience with people again. I think I've lost it a bit as pressures have piled up. Renfrewshire Council: ELC Officer This course was extremely interesting and informative. I love how Nicky is enthusiastic and passionate about her course subject, the knowledge that she has and the way she delivers it is fantastic. Even after a full day at work this was worth every minute. Thankyou Renfrewshire Council: ELC Manager I will always now revert to my core values and beliefs when I feel I'm getting swayed off course or when change is happening. I will try better to understand why people have different beliefs from me. I will be more aware of others’ values and life experiences. I am going to focus more on connecting with staff and looking for the positives in their practice. Renfrewshire Council: ELC Officer I LOVED the course, it was extremely interesting and the trainer clearly has real life hands on experience in practice. I wouldn't change a thing apart from the time, as it was after work and so I was tired. Renfrewshire Council: ELC Officer Thanks so much Nicky! This session was very thought-provoking, and I will definitely implement some of this into my setting now. I love that Nicky comes with the lived experience and shares this. This session gave me lots to consider and think about how to improve my practice. It was very informative and thought provoking, making me think about my own practice and how I can improve the way staff see and think of change. Renfrewshire Council: ELC Officer This training was great, and Nicky is very easy to listen to. I found learning about the science behind why we always feel uneasy about change so interesting. Renfrewshire Council: ELC Officer Nicky, I could actually have listened to you talk all night. You have a calm yet interesting voice that kept me engaged after a long day at work. Thank you. I loved the Padlet idea and will use this with my staff. I found the whole presentation so interesting, engaging and informative.

"It was so helpful by putting the whole session into a completely different way of looking at things...In practice I will definitely be looking at the bigger picture on things and reflecting on different emotions now."

This session really relates to my work and has given me much more of an insight into how to approach different emotional situations with the children. I will look at behaviours more closely now and see if I can assess whether there are other emotions underlying the behaviour. I found the previous training very helpful in practice and will use this training in practice too. Thank you School Aged Childcare Practitioner This session has really helped me to see how all the emotions are connected throughout your body and how to respond to and support these needs. In practice I will now think about why there is the emotional behaviour and will support the child from there. School Aged Childcare Practitioner It was so helpful by putting the whole session into a completely different way of looking at things. Using the Padlet made it fun and easy to look at things in a different way. In practice I will definitely be looking at the bigger picture on things and reflecting on different emotions now.

"The interactive parts were so helpful especially hearing others views. It made me stop and think., especially about my own actions and the impact of these on others and my practice."

Learning about different models of reflection was very interesting and helpful. It was good to see what other people were saying/feeling too on the Mentimeter. I will now reflect on myself more and not just focus on children and families. Thank you Renfrewshire Council Lead Practitioner I really liked the padlet video task and think this would be a nice way to boost morale with my staff. Thinking about my reflection in practice, I will take more time for this and be more kind to myself. Renfrewshire Council Lead Practitioner The video/padlet was excellent and literally 'lift and go', I can use this right away. The interactive parts were so helpful especially hearing others views. It made me stop and think., especially about my own actions and the impact of these on others and my practice. Renfrewshire Council Lead Practitioner The interactive polls were interesting to see across the board what we were all thinking. The reflection on practice was insightful. I am now going to keep a reflective journal. The session was really good, thankyou. Renfrewshire Council Lead Practitioner All the interactive tools were great for online interaction. I particularly liked the team video portfolios. I am going to reflect more about myself and not just in practice. I really enjoy this training session and felt it very relevant on how I am feeling about my career right now, and how I can reflect on those feeling to hopefully provide improvement and answers for me. Renfrewshire Council Lead Practitioner This course gave a great description of the difference between reflection and evaluation. It made me look at how we actually reflect, as I feel we evaluate more. The session was very interesting and I now have great ways to be more reflective. Renfrewshire Council Lead Practitioner I really liked the practical models, especially thinking about the double loop learning model - sometimes we get so caught up in what we need to do to get over the line that we don't think about a better way to do it. I am going to start a personal reflective journal to think deeper on self reflection. Thankyou Nicky.

"This course gave lots of practical ideas to try. I am keen to now start with the photo tours and provide good quality quiet spaces for the children in our setting."

It was interesting to think about values and beliefs and the emotional aspect of these. It was very helpful to be given possible strategies to help us. The great thing about this course was the the lots of new ideas to try in my setting. When I go back to practice I will focus on changing the spaces in setting to support children’s emotions. It was really interesting to get in at belief and values level of emotions. My key takeaway is to start using the pictorial of regulation strategies with the children. This course gave lots of practical ideas to try. I am keen to now start with the photo tours and provide good quality quiet spaces for the children in our setting. I am keen to learn more and develop emotion coaching within the setting to help children with regulation. The published packs shown in the presentation would be very beneficial to support with the teaching of emotions. I found it interesting to understand that having zones for regulation maybe isn’t always the best option because the children know where they feel they can regulate themselves. In practice I am now going to be thinking about where children choose to take themselves to regulate.

Nicky’s passion really shone through during the training. She made the session so enjoyable and understandable and she was easy to approach. I feel I’ve really benefited from the training and can’t wait to implement some of the transitions ideas that were raised.

Thank you I have learnt so much from your course and will be using it to help our school leavers transition to school. Nicky was excellent. Such a wonderful speaker and an engaging course. Excellent session equipped me with so much knowledge and will definitely help to improve my practice going forward! Thank you This was an amazing session. Filled with great ideas I will put into practice. Nicky was incredibly insightful and engaging. She is very good at delivery information. She has lots of amazing ideas and experience.