Less about sessions. More about the world around the person.
Behaviour support can look very different depending on who is delivering it. Both of these have a place. This page explains ours, so you know what to expect from us.
Regular one to one sessions, usually in person. The practitioner works directly with the person on skills or behaviour, most of the change happens inside the session, and the team's job is to carry it over between visits.
For some people, at some points, that is exactly right.
The limit is reach. A session is one hour in a fortnight of hours, and the room it happens in is not the room where the hard moments happen.
We work with the whole team and the family, not only the person. We start by understanding why a behaviour makes sense for them, then change what is around them: the routine, the responses, the environment, the way they are asked.
The main product is a plan the team can use every shift, with coaching to use it well. Time with the person still matters. It is one part of the job, not the whole of it.
The reach is every shift, with every worker, because the plan is there when we are not.
Safe first. Understand next. A better life all the way through.
Three things run at once, but they are not equal, and the order matters.
Safe and steady
Any foreseeable risk is identified early and immediate safeguards go in straight away, before anything is fully understood. That is what an interim plan is for. It is deliberately simple, because a simple plan gets used.
Understand before changing
A functional behaviour assessment: observation, conversations with the team and the family, and the data the team records on shift. This is where the team's input does the heavy lifting, and it is the part most people have never had explained to them. The next section does that.
A better life, not just less risk
Reducing risk is the floor, not the goal. All the way through, we look for early strategies that are safe to start now and make ordinary days better, rather than waiting for the assessment to finish before anything good happens.
Behaviour makes sense in context. The assessment finds the context.
It is not a test and it is not a judgement of anyone. It answers one question: what is this behaviour doing for the person? To answer it, the same ordinary moment is looked at from four angles. Step through one. It is a made up example.
What was already in the background?
Sleep, pain, hunger, a change of face. These are setting events. They do not cause the behaviour on their own, but they lower the tolerance for everything that follows. The team is often the only people who know them, because they happened on shift.
This is why our shift questions ask about comfort, sleep, changes to routine, and what happened just before and just after. They are not extra paperwork. They are the assessment, split into one minute pieces and placed where the moments actually happen.
The team sees what we cannot.
A fortnight has forty two shifts. See what a practitioner and a support team can each see across them, then what happens when every shift leaves a one minute record.
Built to be light
A few specific questions, about a minute a shift. Each one is there because it answers something the assessment needs, so a minute is enough and nothing extra is asked of the team.
Built to see what one visit cannot
Entries across shifts and workers show patterns that nobody standing in the room on a single day could see. Patterns are what a plan is built on.
Built so support does not stop when we leave
The team is with the person far more than we are. Their data lets us spot changes, adjust the plan, and back them up between visits, even when we are not in the room.
Rigorous assessment. Structured process. A plan the team can actually run.
Behaviour support at Foundational Minds is a highly structured, evidence based process. Every plan is built on a high quality assessment, and every strategy is designed for the people who are actually there.
Consultative, not behaviour therapy.
Most positive behaviour support through Foundational Minds is consultative. A specialist behaviour support practitioner works with the person, the people who know them best, and a trained implementation team. It is not the one on one behaviour therapy sessions you may have seen at other practices. It is rigorous assessment and structured processes, designed for the team, that let the practitioner identify the reasons for a behaviour and design a plan that actually works.
Our systems mean we can support people and teams without having to be in the room forever, because the work is high quality, structured, and evidence based, using behavioural science and psychology in a way that makes sense to the people using it.
It looks different for everyone. It usually includes meetings with the person, their team, and the other clinicians involved; assessment and data collection; written reports; strategies shared in plain language; training and coaching for the implementation team; and connecting the work across justice systems, schools, and out of home care placements.
High quality assessment first. Then a plan the team owns and can follow every day. Then follow up that shows whether it is working, and changes it when the evidence says so.
Make a referralThe people we work alongside.
Behaviour support works best when everyone around the person is part of the same plan. These are the people we work with, and what each of them can expect from us.
Participants and families
Children, young people, and adults, with families held as partners rather than bystanders.
Support coordinators
Clear communication, realistic timeframes, and reporting that makes your job easier.
Foster and kinship carers
Trauma informed support for carers holding complex situations with limited backup.
Support and SIL teams
Training and coaching so frontline staff feel confident and consistent.
Schools and early childhood
Collaboration with education teams so support is consistent across the day.
Allied health and providers
Joined up work with the other professionals already in the person's life.
Three short forms, and when to use them.
When a plan uses QR code forms, each code opens a short form on a phone. Nothing to log in to, nothing to write up later.
About a minute
Shift check in
How the person was, how comfortable they were, whether anything in the routine changed, and anything the practitioner should know. Done even if the shift was ordinary. Ordinary shifts are the baseline everything else is measured against.
something happens
Episode log
What was happening before, what it looked like, how long it lasted, and what settled it. Plain words are better than technical ones. If you are not sure it counts, log it.
it happens
Signal log
For one specific word, phrase, or behaviour the plan names as the person's clearest signal. Where they were, what was happening, what you did, and what came next. The more of these there are, the sooner we understand what the person is telling us.
Do the next one. A single gap is fine. If gaps are becoming a pattern, tell the practitioner, because that usually means the form needs fixing, not you.
The forms sit alongside your provider's incident reporting. They do not replace it, and they never replace calling for help.
If the person is in pain, unwell, or overwhelmed, that comes first. Nothing on these forms asks you to read behaviour before you have checked they are okay.
The honest answers.
Is any of this about judging how I support the person?
No. The assessment looks at what is around the person, never at whether a worker did the right thing. If a strategy is not working, that is information about the strategy, and we want to hear it.
What happens to what I write?
It goes straight to the practitioner. We read it regularly, look for patterns, and bring it back to the team at review so you can see what your minutes added up to.
What if I'm not sure whether something counts?
Log it. It is easy for us to set aside an entry that was not needed. It is impossible to recover one that was never made.
Why not just visit more often?
Because the hard moments do not schedule themselves around our visits. Forty two shifts of a team's observation will always tell us more than one more hour of ours, and it costs the team a minute a shift rather than the person's funding.
Does behaviour support replace other supports?
No. It works alongside health, therapy, and daily support. It does not replace any of them, and it does not manage a person's health, seizure, or therapy plans. It sits beside them.
Let's start a conversation.
Participants, families, support coordinators, carers, and allied health colleagues are all welcome to get in touch. The intake team will be in contact within 48 hours to discuss the referral and advise of any current waitlist times.
