By Roni Eyal-Lubling and Kristine Langhoff, The University of Sussex
The Innovate Project is a four-year pan-UK study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from 2019-23. Its aim was to explore how children's social care and third sector organisations were innovating to address the extra-familial risks and/or harms that young people may encounter and experience beyond the family home, including online. Extra-familial risks and/or harms are associated with exploitation, abuse or criminality, and raise safeguarding concerns, for example sexual and criminal exploitation, peer-on-peer abuse, gang affiliation and violence.
The project examined the implementation of three innovative frameworks: Trauma-informed Practice, Contextual Safeguarding, and Transitional Safeguarding. Here we draw upon one particular innovation journey that a local authority embarked upon, using trauma-informed practice.
Trauma-informed Practice was described by Harris and Fallot (2001) as a framework composed of five key principles: safety, trust, choice, collaboration and empowerment. These were later expanded by the American Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2015) and this more expansive definition influenced the UK government's own “Working definition of trauma-informed practice” (HM Government, 2022) to include: safety, trust, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural consideration.
While it can be easy to focus on the trauma-informed working practices of professionals doing direct work with children, young people, and their families, it is necessarily to adopt a whole organisational – and whole-system – approach; professionals need to feel they are being treated in a trauma-informed way and the structure and design of organisational practices need to facilitate this way of working across all levels.
We will use three examples from the research to demonstrate how the framework was used to measurably transform practice in direct practice, professional experience, and organisational culture change.
1. Knowing young people
The role of relationships between professionals and young people is central to providing a sense of safety and trust and usually serves as a route to wider support for young people experiencing risks and harm beyond the home. Evidence of safe, trustworthy relationships were found in our study when professionals shared instances of the efforts they invested in getting to know the young people, remaining curious about their behaviour, and feeling connected and invested in their wellbeing. One said: “We're looking to see – why are these young people behaving in this way? It was… about treating our kids the way you would with your own [kids], it was about getting out, exploring, tackling shopkeepers, finding who our young people's friends were, making sure that we knew about parents and carers of our young people's friends.”
In other cases, we heard professionals begin conversations or multi-agency meetings about young people with complex circumstances - and sometimes dangerous behaviour - by leading with their humanity, strengths, and experiences. One said: “This child is really likeable. Likes his long lieins. Typical teenager. Bit huffy but he works well with us. He's experienced a lot of trauma and loss throughout his life. Had lots of loss and changes in kinship care.”
Throughout the life of the research project, we had the opportunity to observe dozens of meetings and conduct interviews across organisational roles and responsibilities. We noticed that an organisation characterised by making meaningful changes to their service using traumainformed practice as a guiding framework spoke differently about young people, they were known by services and people in the context of genuine relationships. They were not just pieces of data or “cases” that professionals maintained an emotional and practical distance from, where young people were - to use a tired but familiar phrase - “known to” services.
2. Supporting professionals
Besides the importance of building safe relationships with young people, a trauma-informed approach requires creating and sustaining safe relations between staff and professional partners as well. We were able to witness the building of such relations in the multi-agency panels. These panels are professional meetings aimed at reviewing the safeguarding plans of young people affected by extrafamilial risks and/or harms and discussing future steps based on a collaboration between professionals in various agencies, such as education, social care, police and health.
For example, evidence of trauma-informed practice showed up in one multi-agency panel discussion, which began with the panel chair making remarks along these lines: “Okay we will cover the normal agenda. Look at the context, peers, locations and what we can do to respond to that. See what his [the young person] views, family views and strengths are. We'll need to put in place an interim plan and then come back here… We may need to reconvene.”
We interpreted this kind of introduction as creating safety within the meeting, offering a sense of control and emotional containment to the professionals in the room via a road map that was flexible, and did not require professionals to know everything or to get it right the first time - through the use of the term “interim plan”.
We also observed junior practitioners being offered the opportunity for pre-panel consultations where a senior practitioner would meet the junior practitioner and prepare them for the panel, asked them how they can support them, gave them information about the way the panel is conducted and reassured them that they will have their more senior colleague's support. This recognised it as a safe, collaborative way of approaching meetings where serious and life-changing decisions can be made for young people in difficult and dangerous circumstances.
3. Changing organisational expectations, one report at a time
Much of what is done within a safeguarding system to try and keep young people safe is documented via a range of assessments, reports, and action plans. And yet, it can be difficult for time-poor professionals to find new, trauma-informed ways of writing about young people that are not deficit or problem saturated - or at worst, victim blaming.
In our study we were able to observe a change in the ways some professional within an organisation documented their work with young people, moving from a risk-oriented, responsibility-focused discourse to more strength-based, humanising, and nuanced ways of writing about young people and their experiences. For example, one practitioner wrote: “Her behaviour might indicate that she feels unsafe in her environment”, or “he does not feel able to engage right now and we have not yet identified a way to make him feel safe”.
It was very clear that when professionals wrote about young people in a trauma-informed way they would start with the young people's strengths, wouldn't assume a motive, considered context, described behaviour and not blame, and showed curiosity and hope about the young person's life. In order to do this, they needed the time and mental space to think differently about their writing, and they needed (though did not necessarily always get) reporting structures that prioritised strengths, hopes, and possibility.
Key takeaways
Implementing trauma-informed practice requires personal, organisation, and systemic change. It takes time and requires a re-shuffling of professional perceptions about work with young people experiencing extrafamilial risks and/or harms alongside a redesign of practice tools and interventions, and the restructuring of the ways professionals work among themselves and across agencies. There is no one formula for getting it right and organisations become trauma informed through undertaking sometimes remarkably different journeys.
