Aftercare: What happens to us once the review is done?
By Rachel Ringham and Colin Michel
If you work somewhere in the youth safeguarding system in England, whether as a practitioner, a manager or a leader, then we wrote this article for you.
N.B. in this piece, we refer to the “youth safeguarding system” or “system” to mean the work that practitioners, managers and leaders do together across agencies: leadership, structures, processes, and communications that shape youth safeguarding. We are not referring to any one role, service, organisation or sector.
We’re Rachel Ringham and Colin Michel, co-founders of Resonant Collaboration. At the heart of what we do is our commitment to creating spaces of care and learning with professionals who work in youth safeguarding. We’ve had the privilege of collaborating with thousands of you across education, health, housing, social work, police, youth justice, community and other partnership services.
Yes, it can be a tough gig at times. Tough in ways that never quite come through in frameworks and strategy documents. The pressure, the pace, the emotional load and the hard decisions made in conditions that don’t always support thinking. Your chest tightens as you pick through priorities and everything feels urgent. We see you hanging in there, often because your managers notice the work you do, and your leaders protect time so that supervision can hold both feeling and thinking. When that happens, it can feel possible to keep learning and growing as a professional.
But we also see what happens when those conditions are not in place. Brilliant people leave youth safeguarding, not because they stop wanting to make a difference with and on behalf of young people, but because they feel unsupported and have nothing left to give. We see the disruption this creates, and the strain it places across social work and the wider youth-facing workforce.
Toughest realities.
We keep coming back to what happens in the moments when a young person dies, when we look together to understand what has happened, with the aim of learning what needs to change. At first there is discussion, within professional networks and publicly, about recommendations and action plans. At some point, the report is published, maybe after a year, sometimes longer, and you, working across different settings and services, doing this work every day with and on behalf of young people, are expected to return to business as usual.
But your experience of the review can be intensely demanding, practically and emotionally, and it may stay with you for a long time afterward. Space for repair may be limited, and support for sense-making can be scarce.
You might feel as though the safeguarding system has absorbed the learning, while you have been absorbing the emotional cost.
Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews (CSPRs) are designed to help professionals learn together when the worst thing happens, and they matter a great deal. The guidance emphasises that CSPRs should be systemic and focused on learning, not blame (CSPRP 2025).
We have seen how different parts of the system hold different levers: safeguarding partners set tone, timescales, and communications; senior leaders shape arrangements and the appetite for change; managers protect supervision and reflective space; practitioners hold the lived reality and can often articulate what support would help.
We have been alongside you throughout these different processes and more. We have worked with practitioners, managers, and leaders and have seen the courage it takes to stay committed to learning rather than blame. We have seen you step back into painful memories, show uncertainty in public, and still turn up for young people and families. We have heard you say it felt like your professional judgement, history, and decisions were being examined in minute detail.
After witnessing you go through this, we have found ourselves asking some persistent questions as facilitators trying to support CSPRs processes to be systemic and learning-focused:
What happens to people once the review is done?
If we ignore the emotional experience of CSPRs, do we risk undermining the learning we seek?
How might we contribute to aftercare once the review is finished?
After the review
CSPRs must be rigorous and honest, and that means they are often uncomfortable. Each of us is asked to look at the system, and given that the system is made of people, this means looking at ourselves in relation to one another. And it is here that an imbalance can sometimes emerge. While reviews are designed to be systemic and learning-focused, the emotional, personal and professional costs can land heavily on individuals, teams, agencies and partnerships.
For many people, the experience does not feel non-blaming, even when the intention is to keep learning at the centre. A CSPR asks for candour at the very moment the stakes are high and feelings are charged. People are asked to revisit emotionally painful moments and to reflect on decisions made in constrained conditions. Even when handled skilfully, this can feel exposing.
The emotional weight cannot simply be set aside. Feelings move between teams, services and agencies, shaping what can be said, what feels risky to voice, and what kind of learning becomes possible. As anxiety builds, it is human to reach for protection. People may become cautious or defensive, and whole organisations can do the same: tightening processes, leaning on procedures, and seeking certainty. This is understandable, but it can make deep learning harder to achieve.
Although recommendations are usually framed as systems change, the experience can still feel intensely personal. When emotional temperature is high, timelines can slip, drafts take longer, and sign-off becomes more difficult. As pressure builds, systems can turn inward and begin to locate problems in other parts of the partnership. This response is understandable when people are under strain, but it can reduce psychological safety and pull the system away from learning.
Learning is not neutral
CSPRs are real experiences, lived by people who care deeply about this work and who hold responsibility with and on behalf of young people. Many will recognise the heightened anxiety and self-doubt, lingering edges of blame or shame, fear of judgement, and exhaustion, even when the language used is systems and learning.
If we pretend these emotions are not part of the process, we create a contradiction at the heart of safeguarding. We ask for openness and curiosity from a workforce that may be feeling exposed or unsafe while we know that real learning does not happen under threat. None of this removes accountability: precisely because the stakes are so high, aftercare matters if we want learning to be implemented well.
CSPRs bring together factors known to amplify anxiety: exposure to loss and grief, prolonged scrutiny over many months, hindsight applied to decisions made under constraint, and the knowledge that findings will be read publicly and politically. Recent work by Research in Practice has shown us how review processes can sometimes feel unclear, particularly when roles, purpose, support and boundaries are not explicit (Fish, 2024). Together, these conditions can make defensive patterns more likely, at exactly the moment when relational sense-making is most needed.
When organisations are emotionally overloaded, learning takes on a particular texture: anxiety increases, and we reach for what helps us feel steady: planning, structure, reliability. We make work more visible and trackable, we tighten processes, we simplify language, and we turn nuanced learning into tasks and milestones. This is a human response to fear and uncertainty in a high-stakes environment, and it can bring relief. Plans and assurance processes can provide structure and containment, and they can also crowd out slower relational work that allows practice to begin to shift.
The difficulty arises when learning is carried mostly or only through those simplified structures. The work that involves relationships, supervision and culture change has little room to breathe, and without protected time for sense-making and recovery, learning can become something we organise and control, rather than something we absorb and work with together.
This is why we keep returning to aftercare as an issue of ethical leadership. We have seen it done well: thoughtfully held by skilled facilitators, and we have also seen what happens when it is spread thinly: short briefings, email invitations to training, and then, mostly silence. The difference is meaningful and shapes whether people stay open, whether learning is held collectively, and supports change in everyday practice. Aftercare communicates something people feel: you matter.
Creating conducive conditions for aftercare
We believe we must invest in the conditions that make learning possible. We have written about this previously in our work on creating conducive conditions for relational practice (Michel and Billingham 2025), and the same principles apply to CSPRs: aftercare is part of the learning and development infrastructure.
By aftercare, we mean a planned period of support after publication and/or after the review work ends, held at team, service, agency and partnership levels. For example, facilitated team sense-making shortly after publication, protected supervision space to integrate learning into decision-making, and cross-agency forums and communities of practice to support repair, trust-building and to agree how learning will be landed and embedded in practice.
This means creating safe spaces for people and teams to process what they have been through, supported by skilled facilitation that helps translate complex learning into everyday practice. Trauma-informed approaches apply to the professionals, managers and leaders who are holding risk and anxiety across partnerships.
We do better work with and on behalf of young people and families when practitioners, managers and leaders are supported to think, reflect and learn together. When that support is thin, practice narrows, relationships fray, and work becomes more defensive and procedural.
So, after the review, as well as asking how to implement the recommendations, we can ask together:
Have we supported people so that those changes can become meaningful?
Have we created the conditions where ongoing learning is possible?
At Resonant Collaboration, we want to have honest conversations with safeguarding partners about how reviews are held, how people are supported through them, and how learning is carried forward afterwards. If you are trying to strengthen aftercare, build trust across agencies, or move beyond performative implementation into real learning, we would welcome a conversation. Aftercare should be part of the safeguarding infrastructure, not an afterthought.
References
Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel (2025) Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel: Guidance for Safeguarding Partners. June 2025. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/684c0d66bd35d2f88bcba2ca/CSPRP_guidance_for_safeguarding_partners.pdf (Accessed: 25 January 2026).
Fish, S. (2024) Making the local practice review process clearer for everyone. Research in Practice. Available at:
https://www.researchinpractice.org.uk/children/publications/2024/september/making-the-local-practice-review-process-clearer-for-everyone/
Michel, C. and Billingham, L. (2025) Creating conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration in youth safeguarding systems. Resonant Collaboration. Available at:
https://www.resonantcollaboration.co.uk/creating-conducive-conditions-full-article
