CareKnowledge Live Courses

The following online courses are designed to give busy professionals time to think and reflect on what they do, and why they do it. Faciliated by experts, they run on set dates during the year, and can also be commissioned for a full cohort from your organisation on dates to suit you.

Motivational Interviewing

Motivational Interviewing (MI): A Transformative Approach to Empowering Change

Duration: Four 2-hour sessions

Facilitator: Fredrik Eliasson

Do you want to enhance your ability to make the people you support feel accepted, understood, and empowered? Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based, person-centered approach that helps individuals tap into their own reasons for change, fostering motivation and commitment to personal growth. This course will equip you with the skills necessary to create more collaborative, empowering, and impactful relationships in your field.

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Leadership

The Philosophical Leadership Programme

Duration: Seven 2-hour online seminars

Facilitator: Dr Rebekah Howes/Professor Nigel Tubbs

What changes when leaders make space to think?

This seven-week leadership programme invites you into the deeper thinking and understanding that makes for intelligent, imaginative and humane leadership. It challenges leaders to think deeply and critically about themselves and what they believe, asking fundamental questions like: What matters most in leadership and why? What kind of leader do you want to be? What kind of culture do you want to shape? What vision do you want to make possible? And how do you keep asking the questions that matter, even when answers are difficult or unclear?

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The Thinking for Care Programme

The Thinking for Care Programme was developed with CareKnowledge and Barnardo’s in response to a growing need: practitioners and managers increasingly report that the pace of work leaves little room to pause, reflect, or make sense of complex situations. The programme brings together two stand-alone but complementary courses: one focuses on the ideas that shape everyday practice; the other on the ideas that shape relationships, conversation, and connection.

Rather than traditional training, these sessions create and model structured thinking spaces where participants slow down, talk together, and use philosophical ideas as lenses for understanding their professional experiences.

The pilot received exceptional feedback and produced a published evaluation, a peer-reviewed article, and a national webinar chaired by Dame Lorna Boreland-Kelly.

‘The most interesting and thought-provoking sessions I have ever attended… Thank you for re-igniting the fire in me to learn.’

— Participant, 2024

‘I took something away from each session. It was about growing and developing as a person, and this is something I think everyone should be able to do.’

— Participant, 2025

Course 1 - Care in Conversation: Thinking in Practice

Duration: Four 90-minute sessions

Facilitator: Dr Rebekah Howes/Professor Nigel Tubbs

This four-session philosophical course helps you think more deeply about the often-hidden dimensions of your work, and why critical thinking can have such impact in social care practice and leadership.

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Course 2 - Connecting With Care: Re-thinking Connection

Duration: Four 90-minute sessions

Facilitator: Dr Rebekah Howes/Professor Nigel Tubbs

This four-session course helps practitioners and managers think more deeply and clearly about what matters in forming effective relationships.

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Safeguarding

Safeguarding Older Children

Duration: Seven 3-hour sessions

Facilitator: Dr Alex Chard and Wendy Tomlinson

The workshops in this course are aimed at those wishing to explore, expand and use their influence to create change in how professionals — and the systems they inhabit — respond to troubled older children. Working from a place of compassion, understanding and respect, and our professional responsibility for our older children, these will be closed workshops for a small group of practitioners, strategists or leaders.

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Meet the course leaders

Dr Alex Chard

Dr Alex Chard is an organisational consultant, independent academic and author. He has a Professional Doctorate in Systemic Practice. His doctorate focussed on creating systemic change in public sector services. He has 34 years' consultancy experience across a range of public services, including significant experience in organisational review and change processes and creating pan-organisational learning. 

Fredrik Eliasson

Fredrik Eliasson, BS, is the CEO and senior consultant at Cultivate Kindness AB, bringing over two decades of leadership experience in various government operations, including corrections, substance use disorder, mental health and youth care. His passion lies in promoting the adoption and effective implementation of evidence-based practices in practical contexts. Recognized as an expert in Motivational Interviewing, Fredrik is a co-founder of MILO - MI in Leadership and Organizations.

Dr Rebekah Howes 

Dr Rebekah Howes has 15 years’ experience teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the university sector, and publishing and presenting papers internationally. In 2010 she co-designed and led the first Liberal Arts degree in the UK, leading the revival of Liberal Arts study in the UK. She brings to Think Learning the strong belief that what and how we learn should matter to us as human beings, and she hopes to continue to develop this sense of humanity in her work with course participants.

Wendy Tomlinson

Wendy is a social worker who has 25 years' experience of working in and managing children’s services, including a Youth Offending Team and services for Looked After Children and Care Leavers and their foster carers, adopters, and other providers. She also led the Youth Custody Service’s safeguarding agenda.

Professor Nigel Tubbs

Nigel Tubbs was Professor at the University of Winchester for 15 years after having been a school teacher in West Sussex and Brighton the 1980s and early 1990s. He lead two undergraduate programmes, in Education Studies, and more recently in Liberal Arts, which was the first such programme to be reintroduced into English universities for many decades (having begun life in Ancient Greece with Plato and Aristotle).

As a university researcher he wrote nine books, including Socrates On Trial, which was a New Statesman book of the year 2021. He is currently part of a new venture in higher education called Think Learning.