Insights

Behaviour Management is Not a Training Nice – It’s a Fragmented Global Cross-sector Market

For many years, behaviour management & restrictive practice training was viewed as a fragmented operational activity.

That framing increasingly misses the bigger picture.

Across healthcare, education, social care & increasingly public safety systems, organisations globally are confronting the same challenge:

“How do you manage violence, aggression & behavioural crisis safely while reducing restrictive practices?”

Addressing that challenge is driving the emergence of a broader market focused on:
• behaviour management training
• restrictive practice reduction
• workforce risk management
• governance & compliance frameworks

A useful way to understand how this market has developed is through two distinct frameworks:

Duty of Care & Duty of Liability

That distinction still matters, but it is no longer the whole story. Historically, different geographies & sectors have leaned toward one model or the other.

Duty of Care environments – typically seen in the UK, parts of the EU & Australasia & most prevalent across health, social care & education – are shaped by:
• standards, governance & regulatory oversight
• prevention-led approaches
• defined competence frameworks
• organisational accountability

Duty of Liability environments – most clearly seen in the USA &, to a degree, Canada & more prevalent across justice, public safety & public-facing services (retail, hospitality, transport), are shaped by:
• litigation exposure & legal defensibility
• incident documentation requirements
• structured use-of-force models
• risk mitigation frameworks

What is changing:

In the past organisations largely operated within one of these models.

Increasingly, that is no longer the case.

This shift is not theoretical – it is already visible across many sectors & geographies.

Across health, social care, education, justice & public-facing service environments, organisations are now expected to operate credibly across both Duty of Care & Duty of Liability requirements simultaneously.

In practice, this means balancing:
• prevention-first approaches
• governance & standards alignment
• legal defensibility
• consistent documentation

Demand now sits across at least five major sectors (see below) – shaped by common structural pressures
• workforce safety
• governance & accountability
• increasing regulatory scrutiny

Behaviour management is evolving beyond a training niche into a broader workforce safety & governance market, shaped by the convergence of Duty of Care & Duty of Liability frameworks.

A further way to understand this is to look at how demand is distributed across these five sectors – each with different drivers, but increasingly shaped by common pressures e.g.
• In the US healthcare & social assistance workers experience some of the highest rates of workplace violence
• In the UK restraint & use-of-force practices face increasing regulatory scrutiny
• Across public-facing sectors globally, employers are placing greater emphasis on workforce safety & incident management

1. Health & Social Care, primarily Duty of Care requiring
• patient safety & dignity
• restrictive practice reduction
• regulatory compliance
• workforce protection

2. Education, structured approaches to
• de-escalation
• behavioural crisis management
• safe intervention
Alongside rising expectations around student wellbeing & staff safety

3. Justice & Public Safety, more aligned to Duty of Liability, requiring
• defensible use-of-force models
• incident accountability
• risk mitigation

4. Public-Facing Services (retail, hospitality, transport), a growing segment managing in a liability aware environment
• customer aggression
• workforce risk
• incident response & documentation

5. Mental Health Systems, sitting across both frameworks, requiring
• regulatory scrutiny
• strong governance
• risk management