Ayres' Sensory Integration WISE

21/08/2026

We have over 25 years of co-production in mental health and learning disabilities embedded in our training. Our team has worked for over 25 years to do this, and we continue this legacy…from audit, research to practice and innovation, our tools speak to this legacy in how they look, should be used and are named.

Co-design in mental health works together with people who have personal experiences of mental health diagnoses and service use to create more relevant and community-reflective solutions.

The co-design approach is increasingly used in mental health service design and delivery, but is less common in research.

In this scoping review from our OTJR: Special Issue on Community-Engaged Research, the researchers examined articles and reports to understand how co-design is explained in mental health research, what key ideas and values it includes, and recommendations to make co-design work well.

📖 Read the article from Roennfeldt et al.: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15394492251367259

21/08/2026

This one has been a long time coming 🌳

We are finally ready to share the visual identity for the PEAR TREE™ Lens, and we absolutely love it.

Design has always mattered to us. Not simply because something should look beautiful, but because good design can help an idea become clearer, more accessible and more usable. It can take something we have talked about, drawn on scraps of paper, tested, changed and developed together, and give it a recognisable life of its own.

There is a lot of history behind this particular design. Our approach to the visual world of sensory integration has been developing since 2006, always through collaboration between people who understand the ideas and people who have the remarkable ability to make those ideas visible.

PEAR TREE™ continues that tradition.

It feels grounded, human and relational. It reflects the way we want the Lens to be used: not as another checklist or score, but as a way of noticing the whole person, their environment, what they are trying to do, and the relationships and responses around them.

And, perhaps most importantly, it has been created through the same spirit of co-production that sits at the heart of the work itself.

This design means rather a lot to us, for more reasons than we can put into a social media post.

So today, we are simply going to enjoy sharing it. 🌳💜

Welcome to PEAR TREE™.

Participation begins in the body.

www.sensoryproject.org

21/08/2026

Our Ayres’ Sensory Integration for Mental Health and Wellbeing Across the Lifespan original three day live workshop has now evolved into 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗗𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆: 𝗦𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 & 𝗪𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴, shaped by more than a year of testing, feedback and learning with participants, teams and services.

Because good learning shouldn’t disappear when the training day ends.

Over the past year, we’ve listened to therapists, teams and services about what matters most. You told us that live discussion, questions, case work and shared thinking matter — and we’ve kept them.

But you also told us how valuable it is to be able to pause, replay, revisit and return to learning when it becomes relevant in practice.

So Seeing Differently: Sensory Integration, Participation & Wellbeing has been redesigned as a genuinely blended learning journey.

✨ Interactive learning you can return to
✨ Films, lived experience and reflection
✨ Staged learning that gives ideas time to connect with practice
✨ Live tutor sessions focused on discussion, reasoning and case application
✨ Practical Sensory Project tools
✨ Learning across the lifespan

For therapists, it means learning that remains available when a new person, situation or clinical question makes something suddenly meaningful.

For teams and managers, it offers a more flexible approach to workforce development — without losing the human connection that makes learning powerful.

We haven’t simply put three teaching days online.

We’ve redesigned how the learning happens.

Learn. Notice. Connect. Apply. And return when you need to. 🌱

👉 Find out more about Seeing Differently:
https://sensoryproject.org/product/seeing-differently-series/

20/08/2026

We’ve been nominated! 💜💙

We’re incredibly pleased that ASI Wise & The Sensory Project have been nominated for the South West Care Awards.

And it has got us reflecting on what innovation in occupational therapy really means.

For us, innovation is not simply about creating something new. It is about creating something that makes a meaningful difference in everyday life.

For more than 20 years, we have been developing, testing and sharing practical ways of translating sensory integration, neuroscience and occupational therapy into tools that people can actually use.

Sensory Ladders® help people notice and communicate changes in their sensory state.

Sensory Spiders™ help us explore an individual sensory pattern without reducing someone to a score.

And now the PEAR TREE™ Lens helps us bring the Person, Environment, Activity and Relational context together, keeping participation firmly at the centre.

Together, they help us flip the narrative.

Instead of asking, “Why are they behaving like this?”, we can become curious about what the person is experiencing, what their actions might be communicating, what remains unmet and what could change around them.

That matters particularly when people have historically been described using language such as “challenging behaviour” or “behaviours that challenge”.

We can do better.

We can see the sensory person.

We can recognise actions as meaningful.

We can work alongside people rather than doing things to them.

And we can use occupational therapy to support participation, dignity, agency and belonging.

We are especially proud that this work is not being kept behind a paywall. Through our Global Translation Project, Sensory Ladders® resources and around seven hours of learning are being made freely available in an increasing number of languages, supporting access across different communities, cultures and countries.

From an idea that began in occupational therapy practice more than two decades ago to resources now travelling around the world, it has been quite a journey.

Thank you to everyone who has learned with us, challenged our thinking, translated resources, shared their experiences, tested the tools and helped us keep developing them.

And a huge thank you to everyone who has nominated us for the South West Care Awards. 💜💙

Participation begins in the body.

20/08/2026

What if one of the things we need to keep asking about after preterm birth is sensory experience?

A new scoping review, published this week in Children, brings together research on sensory processing and perceptual differences in children born preterm.

And it gives us an important reminder for practice.

A sensory questionnaire may help us notice that something is different. But a sensory profile is not the whole picture, and differences on a questionnaire are not the same as identifying a pattern of sensory integration dysfunction.

The much more useful question is:

How might this child’s sensory and perceptual experience be shaping movement, postural development, feeding, sleep, dressing, play, exploration, relationships and participation?

For us, this paper also matters because it keeps prematurity visible within the sensory history. Sensory differences are not something we should think about predominantly through an autism lens.

For occupational therapists and the wider workforce supporting babies and children born preterm, it invites us to connect what we notice about sensory processing with what is happening in everyday life.

And if we are considering Ayres Sensory Integration®, we need to retain that important distinction between sensory differences, comprehensive assessment and indications for intervention.

A scoping review maps the evidence. It does not tell us that a particular intervention works.

But it does give us another reason to keep asking better questions about sensory experience, development and participation.

Sensory Processing and Perceptual Alterations in Children Born Preterm: A Scoping Review
Children, 18 August 2026
https://doi.org/10.3390/children13081096

20/08/2026

When a child who has experienced early caregiving adversity finds ordinary sound or touch unbearable, what are we actually seeing?

Anxiety? A trauma response? Behaviour?

Or is there also a sensory experience that deserves to be understood in its own right?

New 2026 fMRI research from Banchik and colleagues adds something important to this conversation.

Children and adolescents adopted from foster care had significantly higher sensory over-responsivity and anxiety than non-adopted comparison participants. During mildly aversive sound and touch, they also showed greater activation in sensorimotor regions of the brain.

But perhaps the most interesting finding was what happened within the early adversity group.

Young people with lower sensory over-responsivity showed greater activation in regions including the thalamus and prefrontal cortex. The researchers suggest that patterns of activation and connectivity may reflect developing regulatory or compensatory mechanisms.

Importantly, they accounted for anxiety when examining the relationship between sensory over-responsivity and brain activity.

That does not mean anxiety, adversity and sensory experience sit in separate boxes.

It means we need to be careful about assuming that sensory distress can simply be explained away as anxiety.

And this study sits within a much bigger emerging picture.

Recent SOR research is showing us that sensory over-responsivity occurs across diagnostic groups, has measurable neural and physiological correlates, can overlap with anxiety without being identical to it, and may be influenced by predictability, control and developing regulatory processes.

It is also reminding us that what we see from the outside may not tell us how intense the sensory experience is on the inside.

A quiet child is not necessarily a comfortable child.

A young Person who manages to stay in the room is not necessarily finding the sensory experience tolerable.

Perhaps the question is not simply, “How do we help this child tolerate it?”

Perhaps we need to ask what their nervous system is responding to, what changes when they have choice and predictability, what the environment and activity are asking of them, and what happens relationally when they communicate distress.

The Banchik study does not show that early caregiving adversity causes sensory over-responsivity. It is a small, emerging neuroscience study and there is much more to understand.

But it gives us another good reason not to reduce an embodied sensory experience to behaviour alone.

We have explored this new study alongside recent SOR research in our latest Sensory Project article.

Participation begins in the body.

Banchik, M., Méndez Leal, A. S., Cakar, M. E. et al. (2026). Neural mechanisms of sensory over-responsivity in youth with early caregiver-related adversity. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13034-026-01152-y

20/08/2026

New research: sensory processing, ADHD and participation

A new systematic review by Dunn, Hodgson and Petty (2026) is fascinating and explores sensory processing experiences in people with ADHD across the lifespan and their implications for everyday participation.

One small practice reminder from us:

A Sensory Profile can help us notice patterns, but it is only one part of the picture.

The bigger questions are:

What does this sensory experience mean for this person?
When does it help or create barriers?
What changes across activities and environments?
What supports participation?

The review itself is well worth reading, particularly its call for more research focused on lived experience, co-production, and participation.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rin.2026.100062

20/08/2026

New research worth reading: sensory processing, ADHD and participation

A newly published systematic review by Dunn, Hodgson and Petty brings together research exploring the sensory processing experiences of people with ADHD across the lifespan.

Across the studies reviewed, people with ADHD described both higher and lower sensory responsiveness across different sensory systems. Importantly, the review also begins to explore what these sensory experiences may mean for participation in everyday life, including studying, working and navigating environments.

The authors highlight something particularly important for practice: the evidence remains limited and has been much more focused on measurement than on lived sensory experience. They call for future work that is neurodiversity affirming, co-produced, and more closely connected to accessibility and participation.

For us at The Sensory Project, there is also a small practice reminder here.

This is our reflection rather than a conclusion of the review itself:

A Sensory Profile or other sensory questionnaire can give us useful information, but it is only one part of the picture.

A profile can help us notice patterns worth exploring. It cannot, on its own, tell us why something is happening, how that experience changes across different environments and activities, or what it means for this particular person's participation.

That needs curiosity, conversation, observation, occupational understanding and, where appropriate, further assessment.

So perhaps the question is not simply:

“What does the sensory profile say?”

but:

“What does this sensory experience mean for this person, doing this activity, in this environment, at this moment?”

There is a lot to think about in this paper, and we would really encourage people working with children, young people, and adults with ADHD to read the research itself.

Dunn, V. S., Hodgson, P. & Petty, S. (2026)
A Systematic Review of the Sensory Processing Experiences of People with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Characterising Sensory Profiles and Exploring their Relationship with Participation Barriers in Daily Living.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rin.2026.100062

19/08/2026

Words matter!

ASI Wise welcomes the cross party letter led by Adam Dance MP raising concerns about the framing of Channel 4’s programme, The Great ADHD Myth?

There is an important distinction here.

Scrutinising ADHD services is necessary. We should be asking questions about assessment, waiting times, prescribing, access to support, commercial interests and the quality of care people receive.

But questioning services is not the same as questioning whether ADHD itself is real.

ADHD is recognised within established clinical and diagnostic frameworks. Research continues to help us understand the complex differences associated with attention, executive function, sensory integration and processing, regulation, movement and participation.

For children, young people and adults living with these differences, the consequences are not theoretical.

Language can influence whether a child is understood at school, whether an adult feels able to ask for support at work, whether a family seeks assessment, and whether someone who has spent years struggling begins to doubt their own experience.

That is why the framing matters.

At ASI Wise, we want to see thoughtful, rigorous discussion. We want services questioned where they need to improve. We want the evidence examined carefully. We want people to have access to meaningful, individualised support.

And throughout all of that, we need to remember the person.

What are they experiencing?

What is getting in the way of participation?

What support might make everyday life more manageable?

How can environments, relationships and services respond differently?

We can hold science to account without making neurodiverse people themselves the controversy.

Words matter because they shape stigma, understanding and, ultimately, the support people receive.