Dr Dawn Bradley is the founder of Summit Psychology Services. She has worked in education since 1998. Dawn began as a secondary school teacher of English, Drama, and Child Development, going on to teach in the Prison Service before training as a Child and Educational Psychologist in 2006.

 

Whilst working as an Educational Psychologist in Local Authority services, Dawn drove an initiative to support families and children seeking asylum. She was a member of the West Midlands project and worked closely with schools and agencies to support separated, destitute, and traumatised families. Dawn was also a trainer for the Emotional Literacy in schools initiative and was part of the Targeted Access to Mental Health Team project.

Dawn remains passionate about supporting vulnerable children and young people, and has continued to develop specialist knowledge and skills in childhood adversity (ACEs), the presentation of developmental and traumatic experience, toxic stress, the relational care needs of looked after children, and polyvagal theory applied in practice. She trained as an EMDR trauma therapist and is committed to supporting educational communities to help children and young people experience safety through empathic and reciprocal relationships in schools, how to build resilience through connection and belonging, and how these approaches support cognitive, social, emotional, and psychological growth and development.

Dawn is a strong advocate for transformation and has spoken at conferences at regional, national, and international levels on gender, non-normativity and supporting children and young people with attachment injuries and trauma wounds in schools. Dawn collaborates with Geese theatre and together they bring innovative, stimulating, and issues based theatre of care experienced youngsters and the impact of trauma.

Dawn regularly trains and consults regarding trauma and relational care in education, and focuses on social, emotional, and wellbeing needs. She has researched, developed, and delivered highly valued CPD accredited training and development programmes for many years and which are consistently evaluated as excellent. 

Dawn remains connected to higher education and current research. She researched, developed, and has operationalised the Schools Trauma Informed and Attachment Aware Self-Evaluation Framework (S.T.I.A.A.  S.E.F.) and which is widely used by educational communities which she and her team systemically support through a process of organisational change.

 

Dawn is currently an advisory Educational Psychologist for the ARC (Attachment Research Community), and introduced the nationally accredited Emotional Literacy Support Assistant (ELSA) training to Staffordshire and Stoke Schools in 2018. She is a member of the national ELSA steering committee, a quality assured ELSA trainer and supervisor, practitioner trainer Emotion Coach (UK). Dawn continues to offer Knowledge Shares, Talk Abouts...., World Cafe Discovery Days, traditional training, workshops, Saturday Summits, and Summit Sundowns.  

Dawn has been published in ‘Critical Educational Psychology’ (Wiley BPS Textbooks, November 17, 2016.) She remains active in her passions for all schools to be trauma informed schools and has a book in her mind that she would like to write one day.