Home Safe

Home Safe is a one-day course for the people who care at home. It is for parents, family carers, guardians, foster carers and residential care staff who support a child, young person or adult with a learning disability, autism, an acquired brain injury or behaviour that challenges, and who may need to use physical intervention to keep that person and everyone around them safe.

The school, college, day service or care setting that the person attends is trained for these situations. Their staff learn to spot the build-up, to de-escalate, and, where there is no safer alternative, to hold safely and lawfully. The people who care for that same person at home are very often given none of that training. Home Safe closes that gap.

Everything on the course sits inside the same three-part model we use across all of our training.

Prevent - understand what is driving the behaviour, read the early signs, and change the things that make an incident more likely.

Support - stay calm and connected under pressure, de-escalate, and look after the person, yourself and the rest of the household afterwards.

Protect - know the law, know the limits, and have safe, proportionate physical skills for the moments when nothing else will stop someone being hurt.

Most of the day is spent on Prevent and Support. Physical skills are a last resort and are taught as the smallest part of a much bigger picture.

Our one day Home Safe course gives you practical, lawful and confidence-building skills that you can use the same evening. By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Understand what is behind the behaviour, rather than only reacting to it
• Recognise the early warning signs and act before things escalate
• Use de-escalation that works in a family home, not just in a classroom or on a ward
• Explain the law on reasonable force, defence of others and the Mental Capacity Act in plain English
• Reduce the risks in your home environment before an incident happens
• Use safe disengagement and holding skills proportionately and only as a last resort
• Recognise and avoid positional asphyxia and the other physical risks of restraint
• Support the person, yourself and the rest of the household after an incident
• Record what happened clearly and accurately
• Build a written Home Safe Plan for your household

The skills are the same in all three. The duties, the paperwork and the people in the room are not, so the course runs along one of three pathways.

Family and guardians - parents, siblings, adult children and unpaid carers. Grounded in common law, the Children Act and the Mental Capacity Act, with a Home Safe Plan written around your household.

Foster carers - mapped to the Fostering Services Regulations and the National Minimum Standards, covering delegated authority, the placement plan and your agency's recording route.

Residential and supported living staff - mapped to the Children's Homes Regulations, including the recording and notification duties that follow a restrictive intervention.

Where an employer or regulator requires a specific certified training programme, Home Safe supports that training but does not replace it. Our Positive Handling in Care course does that.

Physical skills are the last resort, not the point of the day. Everything physical is practised slowly, agreed in advance, and signed off as competent before you leave.

We teach:

• Personal safety and stance, so you are harder to hurt
• Disengagement from grabs, hair pulls, bites and scratches
• Guiding and escorting with the least force necessary
• Low-level holds that can be released instantly
• Safer positioning, and recognising when to stop

We never teach:

• Pain compliance of any kind
• Prone or face-down restraint
• Holds that restrict breathing
• Anything that could not be justified as reasonable, necessary and proportionate

All those who successfully complete the course will be certified in Personal Safety Partnership's Home Safe. The certificate records the pathway you attended and the physical skills you were observed as competent in, and is valid for 12 months.

Home Safe is used by the people who live with the behaviour, and by the organisations that support them, including:

• Parents and family carers of children and young people with additional needs
• Families supporting an adult with a learning disability or autism
• Families caring for someone after an acquired brain injury
• Foster carers, including those offering specialist and therapeutic placements
• Independent fostering agencies and local authority fostering services
• Residential children's homes, short break and respite services
• Supported living and adult social care providers
• Special schools and colleges arranging training for the families they work with
• Social workers, SEND teams and transition teams commissioning support for families
• Siblings, grandparents and other members of the household who help day to day