Creating conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration

Re-thinking relational practice in youth safeguarding systems

By Colin Michel and Luke Billingham

This article draws on our experiences of and conversations about youth safeguarding in our respective roles as a safeguarding consultant (Colin) and a youth worker and researcher (Luke). First circulated in August 2024, we have updated the article based on emerging findings from research, ongoing conversations with one another, and with professionals at workshops we have had the pleasure to co-facilitate during the last year.

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Summary

Relational practice does not have an agreed definition (Lamph et al. 2023) although recent research and guidance recognise it as a key component for children’s social work (Cleece et al. 2025), police engagement with young people (Brown et al. 2022), relational working in youth justice (Daly et al. 2025), and in education settings to support attendance (Alaimo & Kelly 2025).

There remains professional uncertainty about what constitutes relational practice in youth safeguarding, despite research consensus that trusted relationships with young people and among professionals are a crucial foundation for positive outcomes.

Resonance is a reciprocal relationship between a person and the world where both person and world are affected and changed. People cannot produce or control resonance at will (Rosa 2019). Resonance is the antithesis of alienation, where a person and ‘the world confront each other with indifference and hostility […] and thus without any inner connection’ (Rosa 2019 p184).

Resonance and alienation offer evocative descriptions of the multi-faceted nature of our relationships with ourselves, with others and with the world around us, which are valuable for defining relational practice in youth safeguarding.

We apply resonance to the topic of relational practice in youth safeguarding to refer to several forms of responsiveness in relationships:

• Professional relationships with young people that are characterised by mutual influence, genuineness, and an element of uncontrollability (Rosa 2018),

• Sustaining professional curiosity about how young people relate to themselves, to their multi-faceted identities and lived experiences, and to other people, places, online spaces, services, and society,

• Collaborative relationships between the professionals, agencies, and sectors involved in our youth safeguarding systems.

The professional capacities for attunement and analysis are core to relational practice in youth safeguarding, whether practised in social work, teaching, youth work, or other professions serving young people. These capacities enable practitioners from any discipline to form and sustain relationships and to contribute to the nurturance of young people’s awareness, agency, and wellbeing.

There are several forces that can constrain or block resonance in youth safeguarding systems. These include:

• Relationships can be emotionally and physically demanding on practitioners who work with young people facing harms like racism, poverty, violence, and exploitation. Practitioners are expected to make sense of and respond to a young person’s reality with minimal practical guidance, while working within inflexible, excessive and/or conflicting procedures, with large workloads and considerable pressures.

• Managers can find themselves expected to narrow the focus of youth safeguarding work on risks, caseloads, procedural compliance, and measurement, making it difficult to invest time in cultivating professional relationships. This narrowing of focus can come at the expense of resonance between professionals and may limit their potential to contribute to positive outcomes with young people.

• For strategic leaders collaborating in youth safeguarding systems, the aliveness of young people, and the realities of relationships with practitioners can get lost from view altogether. Leaders from different disciplines navigate resource constraints, managerialism, risk aversion, silo-working, media scrutiny and reactive politics, drivers which, in combination, can contribute to alienation and the dehumanisation of young people, colleagues and partners.

However, practitioners, managers, leaders, and policymakers can gain knowledge, build capacities, and develop confidence through reflective supervision and learning opportunities.

Professionals can collaborate to foster resonant space (Rosa 2019) for connectedness, for shared purpose and narrative, and for collective accountability between agencies, sectors and disciplines in youth safeguarding systems.

We put forward a framework to show how conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration can be created. Our hope is that this framework supports practitioners, managers, leaders, and policymakers to explore constraints and enablers for relational practice. We aim to strengthen the case for creating conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration in youth safeguarding systems.