“Our goal is to create lasting, positive memories and insights that participants can carry with them into their professional and personal lives.” Lisa Lea-Weston, retreat facilitator and Director of Talking Heads Supervision
Our society is grappling with a mental health and wellbeing crisis affecting both adults and children. School leaders, in particular, face significant challenges in supporting others while managing their own needs. We know that their fast-paced, demanding world leaves little room for prioritising their own mental health and wellbeing.
Continuing our commitment to support special school leaders, NASS has partnered with Talking Heads Supervision Ltd and EcoSensory Therapy to create a retreat in April 2025: "Nurture and Nourish: Taking the Inside Out – Bringing the Outside In." It is a unique opportunity for school leaders to escape their busy lives and spend time in a supportive environment, immersed in nature and in the company of peers.
We asked Lisa Lea-Weston, one of the retreat facilitators and Director of Talking Heads Supervision, to share why she thought this retreat would be so valuable to special school leaders, what inspired its development and how connecting with nature and the benefits of Ecosensory Therapy can lead to lasting positive change.
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What was the inspiration and motivation behind developing the NASS & Talking Heads Retreat for special school leaders?
The inspiration for the retreat comes from the collaborative work between NASS and Talking Heads over the last few years. Both of our organisations recognise that special school leaders undertake a complex and isolated job that needs the kind of support that those who work in mental health and social work generally receive – supervision.
Together in 2019, we piloted a supervision programme just before the Covid pandemic, which provided crucial support to NASS school leaders during this challenging period. Throughout the pandemic, many senior leaders continued their supervision with Talking Heads. For safety reasons, several of these sessions were held outdoors, while online sessions incorporated elements of nature to benefit both supervisors and supervisees.
Sometimes the fear of decision-making during the early years of the Covid pandemic meant that we were all in a place of not knowing how life would unfold. That was powerful. Often there is an illusion that therapists/supervisors/educators are somehow ahead in terms of being a stable place and having “answers”. It is also not an illusion because they spend a lot of time making sure they are a safe container for people they work with, but during the pandemic we all had to learn (as senior leaders) how to try and provide safety (physical and psychological) for others at a critical level whilst not feeling safe ourselves. But we all reflected on and valued time in nature when it became so limited (an hour a day).
In 2020/21 I went on to train with Chris West in EcoSensory therapy and adapted these principles for one-day outdoor supervision sessions, which proved to be joyful and effective. Participants valued the connection to nature, finding it regulated their central nervous systems.
“It was a real opportunity for me to have a safe space to 'be human' alongside fellow headteachers and school leaders. The takeaway for me is that this kind of group supervision is a really valuable component of professional growth which I would like to explore further.” Feedback from an outdoor supervision session
These threads and experiences, combined with NASS also believing that this aspect of attending to wellbeing in supervision is key for our senior school leaders who tirelessly worked throughout the pandemic, making extraordinary sacrifices that often went unseen and uncelebrated, led to the development of the retreat.
How would you describe the NASS & Talking Heads Retreat and what specific benefits do you anticipate for special school leaders who attend?
We hope the retreat will offer an even more complete experience than the day-long sessions Talking Heads has run. Talking Heads run their sessions on a Friday and interestingly, several people choose to stay nearby the night before and there is a marked difference in the excitement levels between those who provided this for themselves and those who get up at 6am to attend! We think that having the night before to be guided into arriving and letting the day/week go will mean that the next day the whole group will be much more rested and ready to attend to a guided day outside with Chris and myself.
We know the research around sensory regulation and Chris developed the model with other colleagues. It is based on sensory integration principles and there is a lot of science behind the structures. Those who have attended the Talking Heads days report that a year on, the model was so simple to use, that it reminds them how they can make difference to themselves between the car park and arriving at the front door of school. That it has stayed with them as a tool and process that is easily available and deeply resourcing.
The retreat will feel safe and practical whilst also taking you to places inside yourself you have not allowed for a long time. One of rest! Many of us need to feel safe to be able to reach this state and this is paramount to this process. EcoSensory as a therapeutic model is most often used with children. Chris and I recognise it also has much potential as a model to be consciously used by adults in this way.
The food will be amazing and the environment, gorgeous! There will be times of quiet but again no one needs to panic as this will be time-boundaried – not long silences which can feel scary.
"Taking the Inside Out, Bringing the Outside In" is the name of the retreat - could you explain the concept behind this phrase and how it relates to the goals of the retreat?
Taking the inside out and bringing the outside in captures what we hope you will experience in all its simple profundity!
Heads spend a lot of time indoors. They also spend a lot of time in their heads and as professionals, tend to be less aware of their bodies and their bodies' connection to their minds because this is their day-to-day way of being. It is fast paced and demanding, and we connect being a leader with using our minds and logical thinking. There is more awareness in specialist settings of the need to attend to whole bodies as our young people remind of this in their communications but it is still the case that Heads are not able to have a lot of time relating in these more physical whole-body ways as they tend to still be more removed. So, what is inside also gets stuck because many Heads still don’t have supervision and they carry a lot of confidential complexity with little outlet. What is inside literally needs to come out as, if it remains stuck, this is a key factor in the build-up of stress which manifests in either physical ill health or mental ill health or both. So, we will go out.
EcoSensory gives us a safe model to begin to reconnect with what our bodies still know but our society increasingly encourages us to ignore - that being outside is “good” for us. Neuroscience is teaching us to understand the impact of it on our nervous systems. We have probably all begun to hear about the impact of green and blue spaces on wellbeing. EcoSensory is broken down into different ways of attending to our central nervous systems (CNS) and how we can settle our CNS with support from nature. Which is free... but the guided facilitation and attention is key. Just going out and being by nature but on a phone all the time is not the same as being guided to pay attention to the sounds, sight, smell of the experience of being outside. And as we pay attention outside to the impact of being soothed and the deepening in to rest – it can allow what is being held to emerge and this is why it is important that the day is facilitated by experienced facilitators. Allowing rest in oneself can bring about insights and change. The retreat is planned to hold any emerging and arising sensations and needs for individuals and for the whole group.
Being with other special school leaders won’t mean that you will spend time being in role around a table or at a conference but is an opportunity to acknowledge that you are with others who face similar daily challenges to you but who have all chosen to experience what it might be like to take the inside out.
We imagine that many school leaders might recognise how great nature is for their children and young people but it may well have been a long time since they have been invited to really connect with the “why” for themselves.
The retreat will inevitably teach something that is embodied and experiential and will therefore be known and accessible long after the retreat has passed. In the words of Maya Angelou: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
What is EcoSensory therapy?
EcoSensory Therapy is an integrative treatment approach to support both the physical and mental health of participants by working alongside nature as a healing medium to regulate through the senses. EcoSensory’s mission is to provide health, education, and social care professionals with the confidence to safely work with nature as a healing and regulating medium.
Bringing together research, evidence and practice, EcoSensory Therapy synthesises and holds the evidence-based and known theories of change into a singular construct. At its heart, the EcoSensory Model (ESM) is a neuro-sequential and neuro-biophysiological model of practice. As you move up through the ESM tree to its canopy, you reach practice tasks that require higher-order brain functioning (from regulation to thinking, planning, reasoning and reflective practice).
Just as trees need strong roots and foundations to grow from, so too the ESM recognises that humans have similar needs. After starting with the foundations for safety, nurture, and nourishment - ‘Ground’, ‘Connect’ and ‘Rhythm’, you move up the neurosequential model and up the heights of the ESM tree model. Next, you find yourselves at ‘Attend’, ‘Create’ and ‘Discover’, which helps to further understand individuals’ sensory, motor, cognitive and executive function systems. Right at the top, within the canopy of the ESM, there is the higher-order cognitive piece, that of ‘Reflect’. Within ‘Reflect’, there consideration is given to the highest-order meta-cognitive activities that allows reflection on what has happened in the day and in the session, to use metaphors, and to support top-down emotion regulation, along with planning, reasoning and risk-management. (Pemrick, unpublished manuscript).
Chris and her colleagues have trained education, health, and social care professionals from around the world in EcoSensory Therapy. They have been able to see the transformational impact of this on them, both personally and professionally.
“It felt very warm, safe and at the same time we were exploring, discovering and learning so much. Its lovely to actual be at the receiving end for once and helped me better understand myself and how my service users feel.”
Society is facing an epidemic regarding mental health and wellbeing needs, for both adults and children. School leaders face extensive challenges in relation to this, and the ways in which they need to support others, whilst considering their own needs.
Working with school leaders in this way, provides the opportunity to support them, to support the teachers they support. This process of co-regulation, supports self-regulation, both in the adults, and the children.
When we give ourselves time and space, we are freed up to be able to notice and consider our own needs, and how nature supports us with these.
What would you say to school leaders who have not perhaps considered this type of development programme?
If you’ve never tried something like this, it’s absolutely designed for you! Our experience with senior leaders shows that working with nature in supervision has a positive impact. EcoSensory therapy is an experiential model that should be experienced firsthand for its benefits to be fully understood.
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If you would like to find out more about the NASS & Talking Heads Retreat, please visit: https://www.nasschools.org.uk/events/the-nass-and-talking-heads-retreat-25th-26th-april-2025/