We have recently held our Annual Conference at Shrewsbury Town Football Stadium, Croud Meadow. We hired the entire football ground to offer all staff high level training and learning with both in-house and guest speakers.

Thursday saw two guest speakers from Hirstwood Training join us. Carol Allen delivered a fantastic interactive session named ‘Sensory on a Shoestring’. She utilised accessible items such as playdough to help accentuate the importance of a sensory experience for learners and showed innovative ways of creating new sensory experiences whilst on a budget. I think everyone will be wanting a colour changing light and a black box now! Staff were also treated to a session by Clive Smith, named ‘Understanding under and over stimulation’. Clive highlighted the ways in which learners can choose to calm themselves down, and how self-stimulatory behaviour can help individuals process information and self‑regulate. Both sessions offered further insight into sensory experiences and inspired Vikki Pryce, our Chief Executive, so much that she has allocated £200 to each scheme to get new sensory resources to enable staff to implement their newfound skills and enhance our learners’ experience with sensory needs. The innovation behind creating some of these ideas is what really inspired everyone, seeing ordinary items being used to create such an incredible impact.

Friday was broken down into three different sessions, two internally led and one externally led. For our internally led sessions, the ‘Annual Refresher’ session was facilitated by Vikki Pryce, our Chief Executive and Jo Mear, our Director of Care. The session covered important mandatory training such as Adult Safeguarding and Fire Safety in an interactive and engaging format. With a quiz for each unit, our staff made sure their knowledge was still up to speed. (And we did see a competitive streak here and there!). Anna Hubbleday and Lorna Mason facilitated a session on ‘Person-centred care’,   a topic that that truly matters to us and underpins our values and practice at CCL. Person-centred care is key to the way that we work with our learners and allows us to create an environment where our learners and residents are at the heart of everything we do. For the externally led session of the day, we had ‘AI and Exploitation’ facilitated by Samantha Brace and Chris Day from West Mercia Police. It was an eye-opening session that taught staff the deeper levels of exploitation and showed just how realistic AI videos can be! Samantha and Chris shocked everyone by opening their eyes to alternative uses of emojis – most of which nobody had encountered before! At Condover, we believe our staff should be equipped to deal with anything that may arise as a threat to both our learners, and staff and to empower them in their own family lives. The aim of the session was to give our staff better knowledge and awareness, so that they can be confident in spotting the signs of exploitation as soon as they arise.

After two busy days of learning, our Annual Conference came to a close with our prestigious internal awards. Elaine Zakovics was awarded her 20-year Service Award. We also presented our internal awards, the Colleague Of The Year Award and the Steve McGill Award. Our Colleague Of The Year Award is awarded in recognition of a member of staff’s outstanding contribution to the staff team. The 2026 finalists for Colleague Of The Year were: Jess Hancox, Matt Andrews, Claire Clarke, Rupinder Kaur and Jennifer Duckett, with Pete Alvis being the proud winner. The Steve McGill Award, our highest level of award, is awarded in recognition of a member of staff’s outstanding contribution to the learners. The finalists for the Steve McGill award were: Saskia Mills, Margaret Jones, Geoffrey Onochie, Andrea O’Malley and Sam Leslie, with Rachel Morris being the winner. We are incredibly proud of everyone, both those who were nominated but especially our two winners. Another big congratulations to you both, we are lucky to have such dedicated staff in our company – it was incredibly hard to narrow it down to just six finalists for each!

We’d like to say a huge thank you to Beth Tudor, who organised the entire two-day conference and made it run incredibly smoothly with her impressive organisation skills. She is the reason we were able to offer such an important training opportunity for our staff.

We would also like to thank Shrewsbury Town Football Club, for having such fantastic hospitality and putting on a fabulous buffet for everyone. They never fail to impress us.

As a final sentiment, thank you to all our incredible speakers, and our own staff for learning so enthusiastically. We’re already looking forward to next year!