The Neurodivergent Staffroom: a sensory profiling workshop

Some days cost more than others, and it's rarely about what happened in them. The light, the noise, the corridor between periods, the staffroom microwave at 12:40. Your nervous system tracks all of it whether you notice or not.

This is a full day, not a lecture. It's built on Winnie Dunn's Sensory Processing Framework and open to every adult in a school. Everyone has a sensory profile, and nobody is asked to disclose anything to take part.

Across the day you build your own field kit in four stages: Terrain, Compass, Field Kit, Traveller. By 3pm you're holding a personal card set, not a page of notes.

The afternoon splits into two tracks: what you're taking back for yourself, and what you're taking back for your school. Most people in the room will be representing their school, so the day ends with something concrete to raise, not a vague mandate to share what you learned.

What you leave with
Your own sensory map and field kit. One environment change and one load management shift you can act on straight away. A structural question worth putting to your leadership team, and a read on who to put it to. The physical card deck, as a reference for staffroom conversations after the day.

For schools
Psychosocial hazards are now an explicit work health and safety duty. A day like this isn't a compliance step on its own, but it gives a staff member the language and the first-hand evidence to name what sensory load is costing a school. That's a useful input to the hazard identification schools are already being asked to do.

On the day
Bring a phone or device for the profiling component. Lunch is BYO, or duck out to the eateries around the corner in Collingwood. Snacks are provided through the day. Places are capped at 15 to 20.

Facilitator
Pip Cleaves is a learning systems designer and AI literacy specialist based in Bendigo, Victoria. She is the founder of Pattern & Thread, a consultancy working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and neurodivergent design.

Her practice is built on more than a decade of workshop design and delivery, including several years as a learning consultant to Adobe and Microsoft's global education teams. She is one of two ICT Peer Coach Master Trainers in Australia, having trained more than seventy facilitators across state education departments.

Formerly Chief Learning Architect at Global Village Learning, Pip brings nearly three years of senior curriculum leadership to her work. She also works at Canva as a Global Content Specialist.