The audit came first – our new ASI1 & ASI 4 Schools

Our new Schools Series has been built on an intentional review, not on assumptions.

For more than 2 years, we have been carefully looking at what learners are asking for, where confidence is growing, where it is still fragile, and where practice realities are stretching beyond the shape of older teaching models.

Kath’s ISIC 2026 Porto presentation gives the clearest view of this work. Regular data gathering for audit began in 2017 to consider feedback and implications for education, practice, and workforce development in the UK and Ireland. It explored trends in sensory integration and processing, trauma exposure and emotional regulation challenges, using data to inform curriculum design and teaching practice. The complete case analysis included 101 cases, drawn from an original 400 data sets, after incomplete fields were removed.

That matters.

This was never simply about gathering data for the sake of interest. It was about using data to shape what we teach, how we teach, and how we support learners to practise safely and confidently in real services.

The audit also sat within a wider organisational review principle. ASI Wise is required to review the teaching programme annually in line with the agreed learning offer, and the Porto presentation describes a continued commitment to additional learning resources that meet Community of Practice needs.

In other words, this has not been a tidy-up. It has been a deliberate repositioning.

Across workshops and modules, we have been asking whether the learning offer is still doing what practitioners, services and children need it to do. We have listened to tutor group questions, fidelity concerns, learner feedback, supervision themes, peer support conversations, and the lived realities of practice across the UK and Ireland.

The audit data also told us that cases are changing.

In Kath’s Porto data audit presentation, case complexity increased over time. Mean complexity scores rose from 9.40 in 2019 to 2021, to 11.24 in 2022 to 2023, and 11.54 in 2024 to 2025. Complexity was coded across mental health, neurodevelopment, physical health and participation impacts.

That is a powerful signal for education.

Referrals are rarely “sensory integration only”. Learners are being asked to hold sensory integration and processing alongside emotional well-being, neurodevelopmental context, trauma, stamina, sleep, pain, medical complexity, medication effects, regulation and participation.

Changing clinical cases should change education programmes.

That is why the Schools Series matters.

It is the first new school-focused series in our wider redesign of how we support learning, reasoning, reflection and application across our programmes. It has been built because the data, the feedback and the community were all pointing in the same direction.

• Therapists need more than information.
• Managers need more than isolated CPD.
• Schools need more than generic advice.
• Children need adults who can notice, understand and respond.

The Schools Series is just one of our responses.