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Behaviour Support Practitioners Australia (BSPA) seeks to represent members as the national peak body for Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) practitioners in Australia.
It serves members that practice, or have an interest in, PBS provision in home and community settings for people with disability across the lifespan (including early childhood and aged care settings).
BSPA is focussed on practice excellence and is invested in the development of high-quality PBS practices by its members, regardless of whether they are state, federal, or privately funded.
In Australia, the biggest single funder of PBS is the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). PBS is, however, recognised by a range of funders including the education system, aged-care, state-based motor vehicle accident insurance, and private funding.
BSPA has been established independently to the NDIS to represent the voice of behaviour support practitioners. However, it is seeking formal linkages with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission to promote a shared agenda of high-quality behaviour support leading to good lives for people with disability, upholding human rights and reducing and eliminating restrictive practices.
Chair, Board of Directors
Dr Alinka Fisher (BDisRehab, PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in Disability and Community Inclusion within the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University. She began her career as a Developmental Educator specialising in PBS for people with disability, with 18 years of practice-based experience in the field. She coordinates and lectures in PBS within the Bachelor of Disability and Developmental Education and Graduate Certificate in PBS, Flinders University. Alinka completed her PhD in PBS for adults with brain injury, with a focus on family involvement. She is an active researcher in this field, and a regular presenter at national and international conferences.
Director
Matt Spicer is a Psychologist and Board Approved Supervisor in Psychology, with over 25 years of experience using PBS for people with disability and complex needs. He is a registered Behaviour Support Practitioner with the NDIS and has contributed as an expert panel member for the establishment of the capability framework for Practitioners. He has presented at national and international conferences on PBS and Trauma Informed Practice for people with disability and has also published in peer reviewed journals and textbooks on these topics.
Director
Dr Geoff Potter (Ph.D., BCBA) is the joint founder and Chief Clinical Officer of The Centre for Positive Behaviour Support a nationwide behaviour support service. He is a Board-Certified Behaviour Analyst and has worked in Positive Behaviour Support for over 32 years. Geoff’s area of expertise is Non-Linear Multi-Element Behaviour Support. He has a research interest in non-aversive situational support and contingency analysis and has been involved in the development of Restricted Practice Systems for governments and providers for over 20 years. Geoff has also published and presented at several international conferences.
Board Member
Dr Erin Leif is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Educational Psychology and Counselling, Faculty of Education, at Monash University. In this role, she coordinates the Master of Applied Behaviour Analysis course, and teaches graduate level coursework in behaviour assessment, behaviour support, and evidence-based practice. Erin’s work places a strong emphasis on the critical importance of upholding and safeguarding the inherent dignity, equality, and freedoms of every individual. At the core of her research lies a deep commitment to promoting social justice and inclusivity, ensuring that the rights of all people, but particularly people with disabilities, are recognised and protected. Erin’s current research focuses on ways to help parents, teachers, and behaviour support practitioners use positive, preventative, evidence-based practices when supporting people with diverse learning needs in home, school, and community settings. Her research interests include positive behaviour support, multi-tiered systems of support, trauma-informed behaviour support, and universal design for learning.
Board Member
Niall Hewitt (B.A.Sc – Disability) is a developmental educator with extensive practical experience implementing positive behaviour support. He is co-founder and director at Rubix Support, a Victorian-based service providing positive behaviour support for children and adults. Niall promotes innovative approaches to relationship and sexuality education for adults and teens with disabilities, and partners with organisations supporting people with disability experiencing family violence.
Director
BSPA also has State Chapter Leaders. This is a group of volunteers passionate about PBS who will be facilitating and connecting with existing PBS Communities of Practice across Australia.
If you want to keep connected with local networking opportunities and state-based events, please join us.
Preparing images for upload
This short tutorial aims to help you optimise your image so that is has appropriate dimensions and as small a file size as possible.
Know where your image is saved
Your image must be saved onto your computer and sitting somewhere in your computers file system. It doesn't matter where, as long as you know where it is.
If your image is currently attached to an email, you will need to save it into your computers file system.
We recommend having it saved on the Desktop for easy access.
Correct image dimensions
To check your images dimensions and file size, you can right-click on it and choose 'Properties'.
The recommended dimensions and file size for images uploaded to a BSPA calendar event are:
Width: between 600px & 900px
Height: between 350px & 600px
File size: less than 300kb
If your image dimensions are bigger than this, you can modify them in the next steps, but if they are smaller then you'll need to find another image.
Import image into online editor
If you are familiar with editing images in Photoshop or some other program, then simply use that program to modify the image so it is within the specifications listed in Step 2.
If not, then we recommend to use 'Photopea' which is a free full featured online image editor.
Click here to open: photopea.com
After it opens in a new browser tab, drag your image from your Desktop (or wherever you have it saved) onto the Photopea page. You can also click the "Open From Computer" link and browse through your computers file system to find and upload the image.
Modify image dimensions if needed
In the Photopea top menu, click Image > Canvas Size. It should open this box:
My sample is image mich taller than it is wide, so I'll reduce the height to make the image square.
In the height box, I'll enter "4128" so that it matches the width, then click OK. This has now cropped the image from the top and the bottom equally.
If the action of your image is all in the top part or bottom part of the image and you don't want to crop into that, then use the "Anchor" tool to tell the editor where to "anchor" the crop from. If you only want to crop the top part of the image, then click the bottom middle square on the Anchor before clicking OK and it will only crop the top of the image. This also works the same if you want to crop the left or right side of an image.
Reducing size and exporting
In the Photopea top menu, click File > Export as > WEBP. It should open this box:
Here you need to enter new dimensions, as per the recommendation in Step 2. Note that the Width and Height boxes are linked, so that when you change one, it will automatically update the other correspondingly. This is to ensure that the image does not get distorted from it's overall dimension ratio.
In the Width box, I'll enter "600", then I'll change the Quality from 92% down to 80%.
This has now updated the resulting file size which is shown at the bottom of the image. As you can see, it is well under the maximum file size of 300kb.
So now, click the Save button, give your image a meaningful name, preferably something similar to the name of the event, and save it onto your Desktop (or other preferred location on your computer).
You now have an optimised image ready for upload to your BSPA event.