Conference Programme
The 2026 UKATA National Conference is an event at which anyone with an interest in Transactional Analysis can join with other like-minded people to learn, network, and celebrate all things TA.
We offer topical keynote sessions and stimulating workshops, as well as a range of social activities to choose from. You can purchase day tickets or join us for the whole event.
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UKATA National Conference 2026
Advancing Knowledge, Enhancing Practice, Connecting Minds
Eastwood Hall, Nottingham
Friday 24 April 2026
08.30 - 12.00
Registration desk is open to welcome you for arrival, refreshments, and networking
07.30 - 08.15
Pre-Conference activity
(please register alongside your workshop choices):
1. Morning Modern Somatic Yoga with Rob Titheradge (he/him)
Rob will lead a yoga session to help start your day!
Rob is a seasoned yoga teacher and fourth-year psychotherapy student with a keen interest in the integration of yoga and eastern practices to enhance well-being through a deepened mind–body connection.
These early morning classes are gentle experiential and draw inspiration from science, somatics, yoga, and eastern traditions. They are designed to advance your understanding of how gentle and functional movement can create a profound release of tension, and sense deep calm.
Through breath work, sound, and simple moving meditations, you will explore accessible techniques that enhance vagal tone, reduce stress, and improve overall well-being.
Mats will be provided, but please feel free to bring your own, along with a blanket, pillow, or any items that will support your comfort during the short relaxation at the end.
These classes are gentle and suitable for complete beginners!
09.00 - 10.45
2. UK-TASTN Network Group
Transactional Analysis Supervisors and Trainers Network (TASTN) Meeting
Open Invitation to All TA Trainers and Supervisors
Join us for the next meeting of the Transactional Analysis Supervisors and Trainers Network (TASTN) at the 2026 UKATA Conference in Nottingham. This informal gathering offers a space for conversation, connection, and shared thinking among those involved in TA training and supervision.
TASTN is a network that belongs to its members and represents all fields of Transactional Analysis. The meeting will follow an open agenda, allowing participants to bring forward discussion items that feel current and relevant to our collective practice.
We welcome all who hold TSTA, PTSTA, or equivalent qualifications, as well as those intending to attend TEW workshops in the coming year. Whether you’re an experienced trainer or just beginning your journey, this is an opportunity to exchange ideas, strengthen professional relationships, and contribute to the ongoing development of our community.
09.30 - 10.30
3. Truth Mandala - honouring the pain of the world
Mary Dees will lead the group.
This ritual provides a simple, respectful, whole group structure for owning and honoring our pain for the world. We sit together in a circle, using symbolic objects for our individual and collective feelings about the climate crises; we hold space for each other to share our fear, sadness, anger and despair. We experience togetherness in our grief and difficult feelings, and honour the tantric side to each: grief is love, fear is courage, anger is passion for justice and emptiness is space for newness.
09.30 - 10.30
4. Connections Pre-Conference Gathering
Our popular Connections Group are offering this session for anyone who would like to find out how to get the best for themselves from conference! Aimed especially at first time attendees, people attending alone, folk who might know anyone (yet!), the purpose of the session is to help settle you in, introduce you to some other delegates, provide you with some ideas about what to expect, how to participate and who to approach for any advice you may need.
You’ll learn more about the Connections offer in place to support throughout the event.
Main Conference Agenda
11.00 - 11.15
Welcome and conference opening Sally Trevaskis (she/her) - UKATA Chair of Trustees will open the
2026 UKATA National Conference
11.15 - 12.15
Friday Keynote:
Jonathan Lake (he/him)
Emerging from Emergency
This talk will look at working with different types of trauma in multiple ways, through an intersectional lens.
The types of trauma will include assessment such as PTS and PTSD, event and developmental trauma and the ways of working include trauma assessing, onsite counselling, critical incident response, private practice and group settings.
By the end of the talk I’d like participants to feel they have a better understanding of the field and practice of trauma response and develop a passion for supporting people in their darkest hour in the most optimal and personalised way.
There will be space to answer questions and some audience participation
12.15 - 13.30
Lunch and networking
13.30 - 16.30
Workshop 1 (including refreshment break)
17.30 - 19.00
UKATA AGM – including refreshments
19.30 - 21.00
Buffet dinner and social time
Saturday 25 April 2026
07.30 - 08.15
Morning Modern Somatic Yoga with Rob Titheradge (he/him)
Rob will lead a yoga session to help start your day!
08.00 - 12.00
Registration desk is open to welcome you for arrival and refreshments
09.15 - 09.30
Welcome to Day 2 and Conference Noticeboard
09.30 - 10.30
Saturday Keynote:
Victoria Baskerville (she/her) and Dwight Turner (he/him)
Decolonising knowledge, Practice and Connecting Minds: An Intersectional Pathway
These last two years have been a frightening time for so many of us and our clients. Worldwide we have been witness to wars, occupation and genocide. And here in Britain over the past twelve months, we have experienced many kinds of hate which has targeted numerous groups from the Trans community to ‘immigrants’, we have witnessed the rise of the Far Right across the Global North, with flags of St George’s being hung on street lamps and crosses drawn on roundabouts in our cities across the country.
Transactional Analysis does not exist in a vacuum outside of this political landscape, and like any theory of practice within the worlds of counselling, psychotherapy, educational and organisational settings, sits at a crossroads. A crossroad where the challenge is to attend to the impact of the personal and the political and its continued relevance to us, our clients, students and organisations, particularly those who are often adversely affected by the wider world they inhabit
This keynote presentation will take us all on a journey beginning with an overview of where our profession sits in the wider political context. Then we will journey through the systems of supremacy which have moulded the theories which we use and influenced how we practice as TA practitioners; before challenging us all to move towards a process of deconstruction and decolonisation, making our profession not only more contemporary but will bring into closer focus the intersectional identities of ourselves, our clients and our community.
10.30 - 11.00
Refreshment Break
11.00 - 13.00
Workshop 2
13.00 - 14.00
Lunch and networking
14.00 - 17.00
Workshop 3 (including refreshment break)
18.15 - 19.00
Drinks Reception and UKATA Medals Presentation and Celebration of Success:
19.30 - 21.00
Gala Dinner
21.00 - late
Entertainment:
Sunday 26 April 2026
07.30 - 08.15
Morning Modern Somatic Yoga with Rob (he/him).
Rob will lead a yoga session to help start your day!
08.00 - 12.00
Registration desk is open to welcome you for arrival and refreshments
10.00 - 12.00
Workshop 4 (including Refreshment Break)
12.00 - 13.00
Conference Closing session
The Eco Collective: Andy Williams (he/him/his), Helen Blackburn (she/her), Sarah Devine (she/her), Mary Dees (she/her) & Rebecca Elston (she/her)
Weaving the Threads: Ecological Knowledge, Practice and Connection
As the UKATA National Conference 2026 draws to a close, the Eco-Collective invites all delegates to gather for a reflective and forward-focused plenary that brings this year’s theme — Advancing Knowledge, Enhancing Practice, Connecting Minds — into vivid, ecological form.
Drawing on the metaphor of threads and inspired by Jane Goodall’s image of the “tapestry of life,” this closing session holds our shared responsibility and creativity within a greater ecological living system. Each of us carries a thread: the learning we take forward, the practices we commit to, and the myriad connections that sustain us. Together, these threads will weave and grow the fabric of Transactional Analysis across all the fields of our community.
We hope that the UKATA Conference has provided fresh perspectives, insights, and challenges, and has inspired you to take away new stories, narratives, hopes, and intentions. We will reflect on what we will carry into our work, our organisations, our environments, contexts, and our world; what threads will we weave into the tapestry of life? How can we include the three interwoven threads of ecological knowledge, practice and interconnectedness?
Together, we will honour what we have begun here and how we will now journey through the landscape to another place that will make a unique contribution to our tapestry.
Ritual
The session will culminate in a collective ritual that moves us from metaphor into shared action; a visible reminder that our Transactional Analysis’s future is something we co-author — one thread at a time.
When we cross the final threshold together, we close the conference honouring our homonomy and intentionality.
13.00 - 14.00
Lunch and networking
14.00 - 16.00
Future Ideas Lab: Co-Designing UKATA’s Strategy
An invitation for members and others who care about the future of TA in the UK to come and shape UKATA’s future direction. Together we’ll explore what’s changing, what matters most, and how UKATA can best serve the TA community as it evolves.
16.00
Conference close and depart