My favourite event of the year so far has been the IDTX: Evidence Informed Practice Conference 2026. This review has been a long time coming, as I attended back in May. It was my first time at this conference, and also the first time it had run in person.
IDTX is run by Tom McDowall, its founder and chair. He’s also the founder and principal consultant at Evolve and was the previous chair of The Learning Network.
The conference was held at Eastside Rooms, Birmingham. Refreshments were available throughout the day, with snacks during breaks and a hot buffet for lunch. The programme included multiple concurrent sessions, so attendees chose one per time slot, with an afternoon break.
The full lineup included Sukhvinder Pabial, Amy Brann, Sara L. Farwell PhD, Maciej D. Zatonski MD PhD, Kurt Ewald Lindley, Elena Marie Ivanushkina, and Joseph Devlin and Laura Watkin, alongside keynote speaker Matthew Richter.
The event was also accredited for CPD hours by The CPD Group.
The Sessions
The event opened with a welcome by Tom McDowall who set the scene for the day: exploration and experimentation. I had the pleasure of having a mentoring session with Tom through the Learning Network a few years ago and I always really enjoy hearing him talk. He is a fountain of knowledge and a really genuine guy.
The opening was followed by the keynote from Matthew Richter, “The Motivation Blueprint: where learning science meets human motivation,” looking at how structure, challenge, feedback, purpose, and connection shape both cognitive load and motivation, and why training tactics that feel motivating often work against deep learning. I really enjoyed this session, as it introduced self determination theory and its application to performance and learning. Since my PhD was largely focused on SDT, it was refreshing to hear it spoken about openly at a non-academic conference.
I think this is one of the reasons I enjoyed the conference so much: it connected evidence based practice to industry. I’ve always felt there was a huge disconnect between the two. As someone who is both an academic and a practitioner, I find events are often aimed at one or the other. This conference struck a great balance, introducing complicated concepts in a way people without an academic background could understand. I hope this encourages people to adopt a more evidence based practice mindset.
After the keynote came the sessions. I attended the ‘Room B’ sessions:
- Sukhvinder Pabial, “An evidence-based look at common learning models”
- Sara L. Farwell and Matt D. Zatonski, “OJT, on the job thinking: critically thinking through the evidence at work”
- Kurt Ewald Lindley, “Promoting Causal Agency: the missing link between learning and behaviour change”
I really enjoyed Sukhvinder’s session were we busted some myths around 70:20:10, NLP and Learning Styles. I always love a session that debunks learning styles as I still see people reference them. I also really enjoyed the way he presented the session, he was a very engaging speaker and he told the session almost like a story with minimal slides.
One idea from Sara and Matt’s session that has stayed with me was around the illusion of skill acquisition. They shared a study where people who had watched a video of someone landing a plane, came away believing they could actually land one themselves if put in an emergency situation. I found this pretty shocking, as landing a plane takes hundreds of hours of training and a deep understanding of physics, meteorology, and engineering, and yet a short video was enough to convince people they’d absorbed the skill!
Matt was a former consultant surgeon and connected this to his own field. In surgical training, you get hands on quite quickly, rather than watching and shadowing repeatedly. He explained that repeated observation can build a false perception of capability rather than actual skill. One line I wrote down in my notebook was “you don’t need to accumulate knowledge to know how to do something.” I think this is quite profound, as it isn’t something many people intuitively believe.
The conference closed with a discussion focused on the panellist’s experiences of engaging in evidence informed practice, the benefits it brings, and the challenges they’ve faced in adopting it. There was the opportunity to attend a social event afterwards, but I couldn’t make this as I had to catch my train back to London.
Networking
I met people I’d worked with previously or met at earlier conferences or groups, which made the networking sessions feel really relaxed, and I enjoyed the conversation a lot. What was really nice was that there wasn’t too much focus on AI, which is just dominating everything at the moment. Everything about this event was grounded in evidence and professional practice, so it felt really informative rather than being full of buzzwords and trends (which can be good sometimes).
Summary
The biggest takeaway for me was that everyone had real evidence behind what they said, and no of the sessions made it feel like a lecture.
If you’d like to learn more, please visit the IDTX website.
I’ve only got one more in person event to attend this year, London Articuland which I’m really looking forward to. Apart from that, I’ll be taking a short break from events and conferences for the rest of the year. I’ve got a few more blog posts lined up though, so watch this space.