Courses & Workshops
Training & Workshops Designed Around You
At Consult Services, every learning experience is built to fit the organisation it serves. Whether you need a fully bespoke training programme created from the ground up or want to adapt one of our established, off‑the‑shelf courses, the content can be shaped around your people, your services and your priorities.
The workshops are never generic. Tailoring the depth, focus, case studies and practical exercises to reflect your operational reality — ensuring the learning lands, sticks and drives meaningful improvement is my offer to you. Even ready‑made courses can be nuanced to your culture, challenges and strategic goals, giving you the confidence that what is delivered is relevant, practical and immediately usable.
Consult Services provides training that meets you where you are and helps you move forward with clarity, capability and confidence.
Indicative price: From £795 per group for a half-day session and £1,295 per group for a full-day session, plus reasonable travel expenses where applicable.
Prices include an initial discussion to tailor the session to your organisation. Additional bespoke development can be quoted separately where extensive customisation is required.
Conflict Management AND DE-ESCALATION
Equip your teams with the confidence and practical skills to handle challenging resident interactions calmly, safely and professionally.
Our Conflict Management and De-escalation course focuses on real‑world social housing scenarios - from missed repairs and service delays to high‑emotion conversations and vulnerability and situations where behaviours may begin to escalate.
Participants develop practical techniques to recognise the early signs of escalation, defuse tension, communicate clearly and set appropriate boundaries, while maintaining empathy, respect and professionalism. The course also explores personal safety, including the additional considerations for colleagues working alone or in residents’ homes.
The training strengthens confidence and consistency across services, helping teams prevent avoidable escalation, reduce complaints and create safer, more positive interactions with residents.
Fully adaptable to your organisation, the course can incorporate your own case studies, policies, service model and resident needs, making the learning realistic, relevant and immediately usable.
Course details
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Duration: Half day (3–3.5 hours) or full day (6 hours), depending on the level of depth and practical scenario work required
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Format: Interactive, facilitated training available face-to-face or online, combining practical techniques, discussion, case studies, scenarios and skills practice
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Group size: Ideally 10–16 participants to enable meaningful discussion and practical exercises
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Audience level: Frontline and customer-facing colleagues, housing and neighbourhood teams, repairs and maintenance staff, contact centre teams, complaints teams, resident engagement staff, supervisors and managers
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Indicative price: From £795 per group for a half-day session and £1,295 per group for a full day, plus reasonable travel expenses for face-to-face delivery
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Bespoke delivery: Content can be tailored to reflect your organisation’s policies, procedures, services and real-life resident scenarios
Typical outcome: Colleagues leave with a practical toolkit they can use immediately, greater confidence in handling difficult interactions, and a clearer understanding of how to de-escalate situations while protecting their own safety and maintaining respectful, resident-focused services.
Pricing is indicative and can be adjusted to reflect the level of tailoring, location and number of sessions required.
Pay It Forward: Turning Tenant Learning into Shared knowledge
Tenants gain valuable insight through training, conferences, landlord meetings, scrutiny and, importantly, their own lived experience. Too often, that knowledge stays with the person who gained it rather than benefiting the wider tenant community.
Pay It Forward is a practical, hands-on workshop that gives tenants a simple and repeatable way to share what they have learned with others.
Participants work through a five-step approach and apply it to their own experiences. The workshop explores how to understand your audience, identify what really matters, choose the right way to communicate it, cut through jargon and use stories and real experiences to make learning memorable.
Whether it is a WhatsApp update, a conversation with other residents, a community meeting, a presentation or contribution to a scrutiny panel, participants develop the confidence to turn what they know into something useful and accessible for others.
The workshop is fully interactive, using practical activities, discussion and real examples throughout.
You don't need to be an expert. You just need something worth sharing.
Workshop details
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Duration: Half day, approximately 3–3.5 hours
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Format: Face-to-face or online interactive workshop
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Group size: Ideally 10–16 participants
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Audience level: Residents, tenants, scrutiny groups, resident panels, tenant representatives and community champions. No previous experience required
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Indicative price: From £795 per group, plus reasonable travel expenses for face-to-face delivery
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Bespoke delivery: Examples and activities can be adapted to reflect your organisation, resident involvement model and local priorities
Typical outcome: Participants leave with greater confidence and a straightforward method for turning their own learning and experience into knowledge they can share with other residents, helping organisations get greater value from investment in resident training, involvement and development.
Regulatory Case Studies: What Good Looks Like
See how strong landlords meet regulatory expectations and learn what that could look like in your organisation.
With proactive consumer regulation now firmly established, Boards, executives and service leaders need to understand not simply what the Consumer Standards say, but what effective delivery and robust assurance look like in practice.
This course brings regulation to life through real regulatory case studies, published judgements, practical examples and sector learning. Participants examine the characteristics of stronger-performing landlords, alongside the weaknesses and failure points identified through regulatory intervention.
We explore areas including safety and quality, repairs, resident influence, complaints, data, governance and assurance, looking at the systems, behaviours and organisational culture that help landlords deliver good outcomes and provide confidence that standards are being met.
Participants consider the difference between having policies and processes in place and being able to evidence that they work in practice, using published regulatory case studies to identify transferable learning for their own organisation. This reflects the regulator's emphasis that landlords should assure themselves that standards are being met rather than waiting for problems to be identified through inspection.
Recent regulatory judgements also provide powerful contrasts. For example, published C1 judgements have highlighted accurate understanding of homes, health and safety oversight and reasonable steps to secure compliance, while poorer outcomes have included weaknesses in stock-condition information and assurance over safety data. [regulatory-casework-review-2026]
This course is ideal for organisations that want to move beyond regulatory theory and explore what good practice looks like in day-to-day service delivery.
Course details
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Duration: Half day (3–3.5 hours) or full day (6 hours)
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Format: Interactive, facilitated training available face-to-face or online, using published regulatory case studies, discussion, practical exercises and organisational reflection
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Group size: Ideally 10–16 participants
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Audience level: Board members, councillors, executives, senior and operational managers, governance and assurance teams, service leads and resident representatives involved in assurance
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Indicative price: From £795 per group for a half day / £1,295 for a full day, plus reasonable travel expenses for face-to-face delivery
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Bespoke delivery: Case studies and exercises can be tailored around your organisation's priorities, services and areas of regulatory risk
Typical outcome: Participants leave with a clearer understanding of what strong regulatory practice looks like, the warning signs associated with weaker assurance, and practical questions and tools they can use to challenge, test and strengthen their own organisation's approach.
Resident Voice, Influence and Scrutiny
Build resident engagement that genuinely shapes services, strengthens assurance and earns trust.
Meaningful resident influence is an important part of the Consumer Standards. The current Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard requires landlords to take tenants’ views into account when making decisions about landlord services, communicate how those views have been considered, and provide information that supports effective tenant scrutiny of performance.
This practical, high-impact course helps organisations move beyond engagement as an activity to create resident involvement that delivers genuine influence, challenge, insight and assurance.
Participants explore how to develop effective resident panels, forums, scrutiny groups and other involvement approaches, ensuring residents have meaningful opportunities to influence decisions and hold their landlord to account.
We look at how to create inclusive and psychologically safe spaces, facilitate constructive conversations, work confidently with challenge and different perspectives, and ensure a wider range of resident voices can be heard.
Crucially, the course explores what happens after residents have spoken: how insight is translated into action, how organisations close the feedback loop, how impact can be demonstrated, and how resident voice can contribute to stronger governance and assurance.
The result is engagement that has a clear purpose, creates visible influence and helps residents see that giving their time and sharing their experiences makes a difference.
Course details
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Duration: Half day (3–3.5 hours) or full day (6 hours)
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Format: Interactive, facilitated training available face-to-face or online, combining practical exercises, discussion, case studies and tools
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Group size: Ideally 10–16 participants
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Audience level: Resident engagement teams, housing and service managers, governance and assurance colleagues, senior leaders, Board members and residents involved in panels, forums or scrutiny
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Indicative price: From £795 per group for a half day / £1,295 for a full day, plus reasonable travel expenses for face-to-face delivery
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Bespoke delivery: The course can be tailored around your existing resident engagement structures, scrutiny arrangements, priorities and challenges
Typical outcome: Participants leave with practical approaches for strengthening resident influence and scrutiny, creating more inclusive involvement, demonstrating the impact of resident voice and building a clearer connection between what residents say, what the organisation does and how leaders know it is making a difference.
Social Housing Regulation: Understanding the Standards, Expectations and Accountability
Give your teams the clarity and confidence they need to understand today's regulatory environment and what it means for them in practice.
Social housing regulation is no longer something that sits solely with Boards, executives or governance teams. The quality of everyday interactions, decisions and services all contribute to resident outcomes and organisational assurance.
This practical and accessible course demystifies the regulatory framework, helping participants understand the Consumer Standards, regulatory expectations and accountability, and how these translate into day-to-day service delivery.
Participants explore what good practice looks like across areas including repairs, safety, customer service, communication, complaints, vulnerability and resident engagement, examining how behaviours and operational decisions can either strengthen or undermine good outcomes for residents.
Through real case studies and sector examples, we explore the wider regulatory and accountability landscape, including the Competence and Conduct Standard, Awaab's Law and the Housing Ombudsman's role and expectations.
Particular attention is given to professionalism, respect, competence and conduct. From 1 October 2026, the Competence and Conduct Standard requires registered providers to ensure relevant staff have the necessary skills, knowledge and experience and exhibit the behaviours needed to deliver good-quality landlord services. It also places expectations on landlords in relation to relevant staff working for their service providers.
Participants leave understanding an important principle: Regulation is not just about policies and processes. It is about what residents experience every day.
Fully adaptable to your organisation, the course can reflect your service model, workforce, resident needs and real-life scenarios, making regulation relevant to the people responsible for delivering services.
Ideal for housing providers and contractors who want their workforce to understand not just the rules, but the part every individual plays in meeting regulatory expectations and delivering good outcomes for residents.
Course details
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Duration: Half day (3–3.5 hours) or full day (6 hours)
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Format: Interactive face-to-face or online training using case studies, scenarios, discussion and practical exercises
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Group size: Ideally 10–16 participants
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Audience level: Suitable for frontline and customer-facing colleagues, repairs and maintenance teams, housing teams, contractors and service-provider staff, managers and team leaders. It can also be adapted for Boards and senior leaders
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Indicative price: From £795 per group for a half day / £1,295 per group for a full day, plus reasonable travel expenses for face-to-face delivery
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Bespoke delivery: Content and scenarios can be tailored to your organisation, services, policies, workforce and regulatory priorities
Typical outcome: Participants leave with a clearer understanding of the social housing regulatory framework, what it means for their individual role, and how their everyday decisions, behaviours and interactions contribute to safe, respectful, resident-centred and well-assured services.
Vulnerability and Resident Experience in Repairs
“What should an operative actually notice, say and do differently when they walk through a resident's front door?”
Help repairs teams recognise vulnerability, respond with empathy and deliver services that feel safe, respectful and professional.
Supporting residents through repairs isn't just about technical skill. It is also about the experience created when someone enters a resident's home.
Vulnerability can be visible or hidden. Residents may experience disability, anxiety, trauma, neurodiversity, financial hardship, communication difficulties or other circumstances that affect how they experience a repair visit.
This practical course helps repairs and maintenance teams understand the lived experience of social housing residents and the important role they play in creating trust, dignity and psychological safety.
Through realistic repairs scenarios and practical techniques, participants learn how to recognise signs that someone may need additional support, adapt their communication, respond appropriately to distress and understand when reasonable adjustments may be needed.
The course explores how seemingly small behaviours, from introductions and explaining what will happen to listening, showing respect for someone's home and checking understanding, can make a significant difference to the resident experience.
Participants also consider professional boundaries and what to do when they see or hear something during a visit that causes concern, reinforcing the importance of recognising, recording and appropriately escalating information through their organisation's agreed processes.
This sits well within the wider regulatory context. The Safety and Quality Standard requires landlords to provide an effective, efficient and timely repairs service and to consider tenants' safety in the design and delivery of landlord services. The Consumer Standards Code of Practice also reinforces that landlords are responsible for delivering the outcomes of the standards and having robust mechanisms for assurance.
Course details
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Duration: Half day (3–3.5 hours)
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Format: Highly practical, interactive training available face-to-face or online, using realistic repairs scenarios, discussion and skills practice
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Group size: Ideally 10–16 participants
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Audience level: Repairs and maintenance operatives, tradespeople, supervisors, planners, contact centre colleagues, subcontractors and other colleagues entering residents' homes
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Indicative price: From £795 per group, plus reasonable travel expenses for face-to-face delivery
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Bespoke delivery: Scenarios and exercises can be tailored to your organisation's repairs service, customer standards, vulnerability approach and escalation processes
Typical outcome: Participants leave better able to recognise vulnerability, adapt their approach, communicate with empathy and professionalism, and understand how their behaviour can help residents feel safe, respected, listened to and treated as individuals.
The Housing Ombudsman & Complaint HANDLING Code
For Repairs and Maintenance Contractors
Help your teams understand the part they play in preventing complaints, putting things right and delivering a positive resident experience.
Designed specifically for contractors delivering repairs and maintenance services in social housing, this focused 90-minute course provides a practical and accessible introduction to the Housing Ombudsman and the statutory Complaint Handling Code.
Contractors are often at the frontline of the resident experience. A missed appointment, poor communication or an unresolved repair can become the source of dissatisfaction, while the way a colleague responds when something goes wrong can make a significant difference.
Through real-world repairs and maintenance scenarios and interactive exercises, participants explore:
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the role of the Housing Ombudsman and the purpose of the Complaint Handling Code
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the difference between a service request and a complaint
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how to recognise and respond appropriately when a resident expresses dissatisfaction
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the importance of communication, record keeping, ownership and follow-through
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how contractor actions and behaviours can contribute to resolving issues early
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learning from complaints and helping prevent problems from happening again
The Code specifically distinguishes a service request from a complaint and makes clear that residents do not have to use the word complaint for dissatisfaction to be recognised. This makes the subject particularly relevant to frontline repairs teams. [newha.co.uk]
The course builds confidence, consistency and accountability, helping contractors understand that good complaint handling starts long before a formal complaint reaches a complaints team.
Course details
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Duration: 90 minutes
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Format: Interactive face-to-face or online session using repairs-based scenarios, discussion and practical exercises
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Group size: Ideally 10–20 participants
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Audience level: Repairs and maintenance operatives, supervisors, planners, contact centre colleagues, contract managers and other contractor staff who interact with social housing residents
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Indicative price: From £495 per group, plus reasonable travel expenses for face-to-face delivery
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Bespoke delivery: Scenarios can be tailored to reflect the contractor's services, client requirements and common causes of resident dissatisfaction
Typical outcome: Participants leave understanding the Housing Ombudsman's role, the key principles of the Complaint Handling Code and, most importantly, what they need to do differently in their own role when a resident is dissatisfied or something has gone wrong.
Reducing Social Housing Stigma
Challenge assumptions. Change everyday behaviours. Deliver services that treat every resident with dignity and respect.
Stigma is not always obvious. It can show up in assumptions, language, tone of voice, body language, attitudes towards people's homes, or the way concerns are heard and responded to.
This practical, behaviour-focused workshop is designed for customer-facing housing teams, contractors and operatives, particularly those working in or visiting residents' homes.
Through myth-busting, real-life scenarios, discussion and micro-behaviour coaching, participants explore common assumptions about social housing and consider how seemingly small behaviours can affect trust, dignity and the resident experience.
Participants learn how to:
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recognise stereotypes, assumptions and unconscious behaviours
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understand how stigma can be experienced by residents
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use respectful, person-centred language
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consider the impact of tone, body language and everyday interactions
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challenge inappropriate language and behaviours constructively
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demonstrate professionalism and respect, even in difficult situations
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translate these principles into everyday behaviours when working in residents' homes
The workshop also makes a timely connection with the Competence and Conduct Standard, which came into effect on 1 October 2026. The Standard requires registered providers to ensure relevant staff have the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours needed to deliver good-quality landlord services, and extends this expectation to relevant staff working for service providers. [gov.uk], [assets.pub...ice.gov.uk]
This is particularly relevant because the Government's response to the development of the Standard highlights concerns raised by tenants about not always being treated with respect. [gov.uk]
Workshop details
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Duration: 2.5 hours
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Format: Highly interactive workshop, available face-to-face or online, using myth-busting, discussion, scenarios, reflection and micro-behaviour coaching
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Group size: Ideally 10–16 participants
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Audience level: Repairs and maintenance operatives, contractors, subcontractors, housing teams, contact centre colleagues and other customer-facing staff
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Indicative price: From £695 per group, plus reasonable travel expenses for face-to-face delivery
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Bespoke delivery: Scenarios and examples can be adapted to reflect your organisation, workforce, resident profile and service environment
Typical outcome: Participants leave with greater awareness of how stigma can show up in everyday interactions and a clear understanding of the small, practical changes in language, attitude and behaviour that help residents feel respected, listened to and valued.
Empower Your Team Today
Custom sessions tailored to your compliance needs and social housing sector expertise.