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 relational practice and youth safeguarding in our roles as a safeguarding consultant (Colin) and as a youth worker and researcher (Luke). First posted 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.

Terms used in this article

  •  the capacity to adjust practice in response to the realities of young people (Khoury, Boisvert-Viens & Goyette 2023) to sustain conditions for resonance. This includes the management capacity to give authority to practitioners to use creativity and respond flexibly in direct practice with young people.

  • The capacity of a young person to develop awareness, make choices, take actions (Maynard & Stuart 2018), influence decisions, engage with structures (Jerome and Starkey 2022), make sense of the world, and experience changes as a person and in relation to the world (Rosa 2019).

  • For youth safeguarding, alienation describes the disconnection between core professional values and the bureaucratic demands of procedures and targets, which obscure the humanity, relational reality, and aliveness of a young person.  

  • The leadership capacity to overcome silo-working and alienation within youth safeguarding systems by creating conditions that are conducive to resonance and collaboration.


  • A young person’s experience of being alive, as a thinking, feeling, and acting human being. This includes their relation to themself, to people and places, and to harmful structures and situations they face.

  • The capacity to give authority to a practitioner to work with young people to improve outcomes. When using this capacity, managers consider the complexity of work, the practitioner’s capacity, and time needed for reflective supervision and development (LGA 2024).

  • The capacity to step back and think about the young person’s strengths, relationships, and situations. To grow this capacity, practitioners think through changes that could shift a young person’s situation in a positive direction.


  • The capacity for connectedness with a young person, and for responding flexibly to their emotional needs and desires (Brierly 2021). Growing and using this capacity enables practitioners to heighten empathy with—and comprehension of—a young person’s realities.  

  • The power given to practitioners in a professional role through legislation, duties, and organisational policies, including leadership and management powers to take decisions and actions in practice.

  • A catalytic process, sparking new thought or realisation, the outcomes of which are increased consciousness of ‘this is who I am’, ‘this is what I like and dislike’ and ‘this is what I am good at and not good at’ (Maynard and Stuart 2018 p8).

Framework for creating conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration in youth safeguarding systems

  1. Youth safeguarding systems and relational practice

What about relational practice?

  • Someone who carries out direct work with young people, whether paid work or as a volunteer.

  • Someone who is paid to take up a role with or on behalf of young people, including in practice, management, or leadership.

  • A commitment to collaboration that sustains resonance in trusted professional relationships with children, young people, and families, and between professionals. Relational practice prioritises relationships and collaboration as a foundation for effective youth safeguarding practice.

  • A reciprocal relationship between a person and the world where both are affected and changed. Resonance cannot be produced or controlled at will.


  • The negative impact on a person’s wellbeing and flourishing, embedded within the fundamental structures of society, such as poverty, inequality, and inadequate social support.


Professional relationships with young people who face abuse, poverty, racism, violence, and exploitation cause dilemmas for those who aim to safeguard them and promote their welfare. Relationships between professionals across education, healthcare, housing, justice, policing, social care, youth, and community settings reveal different and connected ways of being in both “relationship with” and “relation to” others (Long 2016). The layers of professional relationships that affect the life of a young person facing harm helps to clarify what we mean by youth safeguarding systems. 

We define a youth safeguarding system as a purposeful multi-disciplinary collaboration, undertaken at several layers, in direct practice, operational management, strategic leadership, and policymaking together with young people, their families, and communities. For us, the uniting aim of a youth safeguarding system is to create safety with young people exposed to harms from abuse, poverty, racism, violence and exploitation, to prevent further harm, and to nurture young people’s awareness, agency, and wellbeing. This definition has four implications:

  1. Positioning nurturing young people’s awareness, agency, and wellbeing at the core, without placing undue responsibility on young people for preventing or reducing harms and abuse

  2. Recognising the influence of networks of non-professional relationships in young people’s lives as crucial for youth safeguarding.

  3. Extending the purpose and vitality of youth safeguarding beyond any one organisation, sector, or discipline, underlining the quality of collaboration. 

  4. Reinforcing the interrelatedness of each of the parts. The evolving nature of youth safeguarding requires curiosity and flexibility from policymakers, leaders, managers, and practitioners, rather than rigid forms of management and procedural compliance.

There is strong evidence that trusted relationships between practitioners and young people facing harms are crucial for creating safety (Cleece et al 2025, Commission on Young Lives 2022; Daly et al 2025; Firmin et al, 2024; Holmes, 2022; Lamph et al 2023; Lefevre et al, 2019; Lewing et al 2018; Lloyd et al 2023). Researchers describe and apply relational practice in policing (Brown et al 2022), social work (Cleece at al 2025), youth justice (Daly et al 2025), youth work (Hennell 2022), education (Alaimo & Kelly 2025), and general practice (RCGP 2022), among other sectors. Millar, Walker, and Whittington report that young people want services that ‘adopt a relational approach, underpinned by trust and relatability, and which strive for collaboration and power-sharing between young people and adults, rather than surveillance and monitoring of young people’s behaviour’ (2023, p119).

Despite this consensus, there is widespread professional uncertainty and anxiety about what is involved—and not involved—in doing relational practice at every layer of youth safeguarding systems, which is exacerbated by the lack of a coherent, comprehensive model for relational practice (Lamph et al 2023) despite the term being researched,  A range of models for practice in youth safeguarding systems overlap with relational practice. Examples include the connections between strength-based and relationship-based approaches (Tackling Child Exploitation 2023), trauma-informed practice that responds to extra-familial harms (Hickle 2019), and in restorative practice in education (Finnis 2021). Relational practice for youth safeguarding also demands that professionals apply deeper listening to young people (Reclaim 2022): to their circumstances, intersectional perspectives, evolving identities, and lived experience, including racialisation, racism, classism, genderism, religious discrimination, homophobia, and ableism, among other harmful social structures.