A Six-Week Programme for Every Staff Member
Just 15 minutes each, simple enough for staff meetings
We regulate through connection
For The Adults Who Hold The Room
A six-week nervous system regulation programme built specifically for teaching staff, support staff, office staff, lunchtime supervisors, and anyone else who spends their day around children. Because a regulated classroom starts with a regulated adult.
Some schools choose to bring in the full Calm Coach offering. Others decide to start here, with staff, alone. Either way, this programme stands entirely on its own.
Each session is around 15 minutes, pre-recorded, and simple enough to watch together in a staff meeting.
Why Begin With The Staff?
Children read the adults around them constantly, often well before anything is said out loud. A regulated adult in the room tends to bring the whole room down with them, before a single lesson has been taught or a single instruction given.
It works the other way too. A classroom of children who’ve arrived from a difficult morning, a rushed journey, or an argument with a friend will, without meaning to, pull on the nervous system of the adult in the room across the day. So this isn’t only about what staff can offer children. It’s about protecting staff themselves, because they’re absorbing that state whether they mean to or not.
That’s why The Calm Coach begins with the adults, not the children.
What The Programme Includes
Six weekly sessions, around 15 minutes each, delivered as pre-recorded video and designed to be watched together at a staff meeting, or individually, whatever suits your setting.
An optional daily practice, designed to be played with a class before morning and afternoon registration. This is entirely at each school’s discretion, though we’d love every class to take part in some form of it, ideally twice a day. Even once a day makes a genuine difference.
Real nervous system science, explained in accessible terms across the six weeks, including the Window of Tolerance, co-regulation, and neuroplasticity, so staff understand not just what to do but why it works.
Practical, evidence-based tools, including heart breathing, coherent breathing, the physiological sigh, shake and sigh, self-holding, and pendulation, all things staff can use for themselves as much as with their pupils.
Built With Every Member of Staff In Mind
Every nervous system is different, and that’s especially true for neurodivergent staff and pupils, who may experience stress, sensory input and regulation in their own particular way. Heart breathing, the anchor practice used throughout this programme, is a genuinely accessible tool for this. It requires no talking and no cognitive processing, just a hand on the heart and a slow breath, so it works whether a staff member or a pupil finds verbal or cognitive approaches to calming down easy, difficult, or simply not how they’re wired. This also means staff can model and use these tools confidently with neurodivergent pupils, knowing the practice itself doesn’t depend on the kind of verbal reflection or discussion some children find genuinely hard.
What Each Session Looks Like
We know there will be scepticism in any staff room, and that’s completely fair. Nobody’s asked to take anything on faith. Two minutes, twice a day, is a small cost against a full teaching day, and what it tends to buy back is a class that starts from a steadier baseline, which usually means less time spent settling behaviour later in the session. Staff are welcome to judge that for themselves once they’ve tried it for a few weeks.
What This Gives Your Staff
- A genuine understanding of their own nervous system, not just their pupils’
- Practical tools they can use privately, discreetly, at their desk or in the classroom
- A shared language across the whole staff team for talking about stress and regulation
- Support for staff wellbeing that sits alongside, not separate from, the school day
What’s Missing From Most Staff Wellbeing Provisions
Despite this, most staff wellbeing provision in UK schools is reactive rather than preventative. An Employee Assistance Programme, offering confidential counselling once someone has reached crisis point, is often the only support in place. That matters, and it helps. But it’s support that arrives after stress has already taken hold, not something built into the rhythm of an ordinary week.
The Calm Coach staff programme sits earlier than that. It’s free, built directly into a staff meeting, and available at home too for anyone who misses a session, so support isn’t limited to the people who happened to be in the room, or who’ve already reached the point of needing to ask for help.
The Evidence
There’s a direct, measured link between staff wellbeing and pupil outcomes, not just anecdotally, but in published research. See The Science for the full picture, including where the evidence is strongest and where it’s still developing.
Ready to Get Going?
The staff programme is free to UK schools, alongside the rest of The Calm Coach offering.
Contact Victoria
