Our Trainers

Steve Lewis

Steve is a qualified first aid trainer with 25 years training experience and 33 years hands-on practical first aid experience. For the last 24 years he has worked with the emergency services in a practical and training manner.

Chris Walvin

Chris is a Director of Accredo Support & Development Ltd, a service that provides support packages to individuals with mental illness, learning disabilities and people with autistic spectrum conditions including Asperger’s syndrome. He has over 20 years experience in the care field.

Lin Talbot

Lin has been involved in delivering and writing training programmes for over 30 years. She is now a Director of Lin Talbot Training Limited, a small training consultancy, supplying quality affordable training to the care sector in and around the South East of England. The company is now well established and in addition to other areas, Lin and her team specialise in awareness-raising sessions for the wide range of commonly found health conditions that staff encounter in the domiciliary, residential and hospital environments such as: Stroke, Parkinson’s disease, Motor Neurone disease, Epilepsy, Multiple Sclerosis, Diabetes, etc. They also train extensively in the area of mental health, learning disabilities and effective communication.

Mike Hills

Mike is a highly experienced environmental health officer and has proved to be a popular trainer for us over the years. He presents training in a good humoured, lively and entertaining manner and is highly successful in enabling participants to achieve certification in a range of health and safety and food hygiene subjects.

John Mortlock

John has worked with people with autistic spectrum conditions for over 30 years, first as a teacher, then as day care officer and residential support worker with adolescents and adults. He was a registered manager of residential centres for men and women with ASC on the Wirral and in Gloucestershire and became Director of the Mid Counties Autistic Society. In 1991, John became the senior partner in MCT Consultancy specialising in assessing, advising and reporting on the service needs of people with ASC.

He has worked with a wide range of social care, health and education service providers, written and delivered training materials for the NAS and presented papers on the management of people with ASC at conferences in the UK, Ireland, Turkey and Denmark. John is a director of the Care-Training group of companies and autism consultant to Active Care Partnerships. He is a co-author of `Autism Focus’ and `Focus on Challenging Behaviour’; distance learning packs for practitioners.

Jon Hull

Jon is a Registered Nurse with many years’ experience of working both in statutory services and the private sector. He has worked in a variety of environments supporting carers to provide services and accommodation for individuals whose behaviour, carers and staff find challenging. He is also interested in risk assessment and the law relating to supporting individuals during crisis situations. He has a wide and varied experience of working with children and adults with Learning Disabilities, Autism, Asperger syndrome, and the Mental Health difficulties associated with these conditions.

In the past Jon has managed a number of residential units including a regional interim secure provision. He also spent a number of years managing a Community Nursing Team, supporting individuals and families in community settings. At present he provides behavioural consultancy and specialist nursing advice to a number of services and is also developing a physical intervention training package. He has worked alongside Bradstow School to build on their database to include risk assessment functionality within it; this is distributed as a joint venture with BILD. Jon has also been involved in working with organisations to develop a proposal and model for in-house training.

Rachel Lowden

Rachel is a practicing Drama Therapist and Social Skills practitioner. She has experience of working with children and adults across the autistic spectrum including work within families, education, residential and day care services. Rachel was formerly a lecturer and is presently working as a freelance consultant for Autism Sussex, and running a theatre company for adults with Asperger’s syndrome.

Rachel is actively involved with academic research predominantly relating to social behaviour and mental health problems experienced by people with autism.

Stephanie Robinson PhD

Stephanie has worked extensively in the field of autism. She currently lectures in learning and teaching at Brunel University, and has research interests in Autistic Spectrum Conditions. She is an independent trainer in autism and a regional tutor to Birmingham University’s distance education course in autism. She is on the editorial board of the Good Autism Practice Journal.

David Moat

David is a psychotherapist and hypno-therapist, as well as being an experienced practitioner in the field of autism and Asperger syndrome. He has worked with people with autistic spectrum conditions for some 25 years. He has had responsibility for residential and day care services, Family and Community Support and the provision of training, assessments and advice to various agencies.

David has been chair (1999-2001) of CoSPPA - The Confederation of Service Providers for People with Autism. He is an active participant in the Autism Services Accreditation Programme, as a registered Team Leader. He divides his time between his training and consultancy business (Autism Quality SEARCH), and his psychotherapy practice (ASD Therapy). David is a director of and tutor for SACH UK (School of Analytic and Cognitive Hypnotherapy).

Alasdair Kelly

Alasdair has substantial experience of both the public and private sector in senior management roles as well as learning/development for over 30 years. He has managed Social Security offices, been the national Management Development Manager for First Direct (the award winning telephone/internet bank) and was a Principal Consultant for Atkins Management Consultants in their Centre for Corporate Learning.

He is a double OU graduate, BA and BSc, holds a postgraduate qualification in Business Excellence from the University of Leeds, is qualified in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and is a member of the CIPD. Recently he has been working as an independent consultant with two major central governmental departments on a range of self-development programmes.