The Method
How padwork helps us reach young people traditional approaches often struggle to engage
Assistant Principal for Student Services, Angela Tombs
“Peaceable Padwork has made a huge difference to the lives of a number of our
learners. "
Headteacher Paul Norman
"I'd highly recommend Peaceable. The training they delivered to our team was excellent."
Councillor Ian North
"We've watched as our service users have benefited for years. Highly recommend.”
Why it works
Most calming methods ask a wound-up young person to settle down. For a lot of them, that backfires.
Movement mentoring works the other way. Instead of asking a young person to suppress what they're feeling, padwork gives that energy somewhere to go - into structured, satisfying movement they can do at their own pace, with no one to compare themselves to. They come out the other side calmer, more focused, and more in their bodies.
And those calm moments between rounds are where the real work happens — where a settled young person can finally take in the things that are almost impossible to teach when they're dysregulated.
Movement mentoring is delivered in two ways, depending on the young person. For those who can engage with discussion, short social and emotional lessons are woven into the breaks between rounds. For young people with more complex physical and mental needs, the work becomes sensory - pairing movement with counting, sound, and rhythm. Both build the same thing: regulation, focus, and connection.
How it helps young people with complex needs
For young people with complex physical and mental health needs, padwork does something rare — it works the body and the mind at once, and they enjoy it enough to keep coming back. Here's what it builds:
Physical and mental stimulation. Padwork engages the whole person — body, focus, and attention together. For young people who find traditional exercise or seated learning hard to access, it offers both at once, in a form they can actually engage with.
Neuroplasticity. Repeated, structured and coordinated movement provides opportunities to practise attention, coordination and regulation — skills that can strengthen with repetition.
Impulse control. Padwork is all about controlled power — hitting on cue, holding back, waiting, responding. Practising that control in the body helps young people build it everywhere else, so they can catch an impulse before it takes over.
Regulation and calm. The activity channels stress and anxiety into movement rather than against it, leaving young people calmer and more settled — often when nothing else has worked.
Fun. This matters more than it sounds. Padwork is genuinely enjoyable, which means young people want to do it. Engagement is half the battle with this group, and enjoyment is what brings them back.
The young people who benefit:
Movement mentoring is designed for young people who don't fit the standard mould — the ones most approaches struggle to reach. It works particularly well for:
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Young people with autism, ADHD, and other neurodivergent profiles
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Young people with complex physical and mental health needs
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Young people with high anxiety, or who struggle to regulate their emotions
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Young people with poor impulse control, or who find conflict hard to manage
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Young people with PDA profiles, attachment difficulties, or sensory differences
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Young people who don't engage with talking-based or seated interventions
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Young people who are looked-after, care-experienced, or living in residential care
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Young people who are home-educated, in alternative provision, excluded, or at risk of exclusion
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Young people known to youth justice, youth support, or early-help services
For young people with the most complex needs - including those who can't engage with talking or seated learning - the sensory mode of movement mentoring reaches them through rhythm, sound, and movement instead of words.
If you work with young people who've been failed by approaches that weren't built for them, this is built for exactly those young people.
Who can become a mentor?
You don't need to be fit, strong, or to have ever boxed. The course is built for the people already in these young people's lives:
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Teachers, teaching assistants, SENCOs, and inclusion leads
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PE teachers and sports staff
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Therapists, occupational therapists, and behavioural support workers
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Staff in SEND units, alternative provision, and pupil referral units
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Residential care and children's home staff
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Youth workers, youth justice and youth offending teams, and early-help practitioners
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Local authority and integrated care board teams developing SEND and inclusion provision
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Parents and carers, including those home-educating
If you spend time with young people who are hard to reach, you can learn to deliver movement mentoring with them.
What to expect from a session:
There's no single fixed session. We read the young person and adapt - which is why movement mentoring reaches young people that one-size approaches miss. In practice, it takes one of two forms.
Micro-workshops
For young people who can engage with discussion, a session runs around 15 to 30 minutes. A short warm-up, then three to five rounds of padwork at different intensities. Between each round - while the young person is catching their breath and feeling settled - a short conversation, around a minute, on one specific social or emotional skill. The padwork holds them in a calm, focused state; the conversations slip the real teaching into the window where it can actually land.
Sensory movement
For young people with more complex physical and mental needs -including those who can't engage with talk or seated learning - the work becomes sensory. Movements are paired with counting, sound, and rhythm, so the young person builds body awareness, focus, and regulation through the senses rather than through words. The structure is predictable and repeatable, which helps a dysregulated young person feel safe, and the rhythm itself becomes calming.
Both forms do the same underlying work - settling the body so the young person can grow. Most young people working with either mode regularly show clear changes in how they settle, focus, and connect within four to eight weeks.
Movement mentoring and micro-learning:
First movement settles ths body and then we reach the person.
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Conversations that land
For young people who can engage with discussions. A session runs around 15 to 30 minutes - a short warm-up, then three to five rounds of padwork at different intensities.
Between each round, while the young person is catching their breath and feeling settled, a short conversation on one specific social or emotional skill. The padwork holds them calm and focused; the conversations slip the real teaching into the window where it can actually land.
Adults can choose a Peaceable workshop or their own pressing topic, relevant to the student. The point is that the student is engaged.
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Multi-sensory padwork
For young people with more complex physical and mental needs — including those who can't engage with talk or seated learning. Here, the work becomes sensory.
Movements are paired with counting, sound, and rhythm, so the young person builds body awareness, focus, and regulation through the senses rather than through words. The structure is predictable and repeatable, which helps a dysregulated young person feel safe - and the rhythm itself becomes calming.
Structured check-ins
For when teachers have specific topics to discuss, they are taught how to break those down into bite-sized chunks for maximum engagement during padwork.
Nothing helps students to engage like padwork and you can use this to help broach a variety of pertinent topics that students might feel awkward discussing but need to chat about or get guidance on.
How we know it works
The building blocks of movement mentoring are well understood on their own. Structured physical movement supports the brain's ability to grow and rewire. Controlled exertion eases stress and anxiety. Predictable structure helps a dysregulated young person feel safe. And a calm, regulated state is when learning sticks.
What's new is the way movement mentoring brings these together — and that's the subject of a Peaceable whitepaper Bee is currently writing, drawing on fifteen years of delivery across mainstream and SEND settings. Course participants and partner settings can ask for early access.