Name: Beyond Behaviour: Understanding barriers to learning and relationships
Start: 2026-01-17T10:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-01-17T13:00:00+00:00
Location: Watershed

Beyond Behaviour: Understanding barriers to learning and relationships

Join us at our innovative conference. Gain expert insight and advice on how to support the children and families you work with.
About this Event

Join therapists and school professionals to gain insight into the barriers to learning and relationships faced by those who have experienced care, trauma, or inequalities, and those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

With Dr Sarah Sutton, psychotherapist, author, and founder of Understanding Children, and co-founder of The Learning Studio, and a panel of therapists and school staff, this experiential event offers a space to reflect confidentially and gain insight into the children and young people you support.

The day will consist of a workshop facilitated by Dr Sarah Sutton, who will introduce a dynamic model of thinking about the systems and relationships that surround young people. There will be an opportunity to share examples from your work with young people and their families in a confidential setting for small-group discussion.

This will be followed by a panel discussion bringing together school staff and therapists for a Q&A session.

Dr Sarah Sutton is a psychotherapist with thirty years’ experience of working with parents, children and adolescents who have suffered adversity and are struggling behaviourally and emotionally. She is the author of Being Taken In: The Framing Relationship (Karnac, 2014), and has co-edited the Journal of Child Psychotherapy. She is also the founder of Understanding Children and co-founder of the Learning Studio, teaching, writing and working on the interface between developmental research and psychoanalytic ideas.

is part of a Bristol-based charity with a big mission to support families who face the greatest barriers to wellbeing in our community. Building on 40 years of supporting families, we have spent the past decade partnering with schools and funders to provide free, accessible therapy for children and young people in areas most affected by socioeconomic inequality. We work collaboratively with families and the professionals around them, sharing therapeutic approaches that help strengthen relationships and build lasting change.