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 our reading and research, conversations with each other, and with professionals at workshops we have had the pleasure of co-facilitating over the last year.

The article is for everyone who works in youth safeguarding systems, whether in direct practice, management, leadership or policy-making.

With thanks to Dez Holmes, Rachel Allen-Ringham, and Zoya Wallington, who read earlier drafts of this article and offered wise comments that have made it better.

Terms used in this article

1: Youth safeguarding systems, relational practice and resonance

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. Several kinds of relationships exist between professionals across education, healthcare, housing, justice, policing, social care, youth, and community settings, revealing different and connected ways of being in both “relationship with” and “relation to” others (Long 2016). Recognising 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, multiagency, multidisciplinary collaboration undertaken at multiple levels, including direct practice, operational management, strategic leadership, and policymaking, and in partnership 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 harm from abuse, poverty, racism, violence and exploitation, to prevent further harm, and to nurture young people’s awareness, agency, and wellbeing.

We suggest this definition has four implications:

1. Positioning the nurture of 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 the scope of any one organisation, sector, or discipline, underlining the significance of the quality of collaboration. 

4. Reinforcing the interrelatedness of each part of the system. 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.

What about relational practice?

There is strong evidence that trusted relationships between practitioners and young people facing harms form a crucial foundation for creating safety (Commission on Young Lives, 2022; 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 et 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. This is not helped by the lack of a coherent, comprehensive model for relational practice (Lamph et al, 2023), despite the term being extensively researched. A range of frameworks for practice in youth safeguarding systems overlap with relational practice and may contribute to uncertainty and anxiety. Examples of this include the connections between strength-based and relationship-based approaches (Tackling Child Exploitation, 2023), trauma-informed practice in response to extra-familial harms (Lefevre et al, 2024) and 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 realities, intersectional perspectives, evolving identities, and lived experience, including racialisation, racism, classism, genderism, religious discrimination, homophobia, and ableism, among other harmful social structures. 

The capacity for attunement

We use ‘capacities’, rather than ‘skills’, to encompass capabilities that can be learned and grown (Trevithick 2012) for relational practice. Skills imply an instrumental subject-object relationship between the practitioner and the young person, suggesting a level of predictability and control that is at odds with resonance. By contrast, capacities suggest receptivity, responsiveness, and the potential to be affected. 

Attunement is a capacity for connectedness while being with a young person. It enables a practitioner to heighten their empathy with—and comprehension of—a young person’s experiences (Stern 1985, Gilkerson and Pryce 2021). This deep attentiveness in the here-and-now (Mann 2020) allows practitioners to tune in with the young person’s emotional life and internal state (Brierly 2021), enhancing the practitioner’s sensitivity to emotional feedback loops (Hollenstein 2015) between the young person’s feelings, thoughts, and reflections (Gilkerson and Pryce 2021). These loops sharpen the practitioner’s capacity to feel the aliveness of the young person, which means attunement to the young person’s experience as a thinking, feeling human being. This includes their relation to themselves, their multi-faceted identities (Jajarmi et al 2025), to people, places, and online spaces in their lives now and in the past, to harmful situations they face in the present, and to structural harm arising from societal inequalities such as racism, sexism, and classism, among others.

When working with young people who experience harm, professionals often encounter safeguarding dilemmas (Beckett and Lloyd 2022). Analysis is the capacity to step back, to think about the young person and make sense of information and perceptions of their relationships and situations from multiple angles (Munro 2011). It involves applying a variety of approaches to think through the changes that might be needed to shift the young person’s situation in a positive direction that makes sense to them, including in response to actual or potential harms. Analysis is a collaborative process of critical reflection and sense-making with young people, and in dialogue with other professionals, to refine a shared, intersectional understanding, (Crenshaw 1991; Davis 2022). 

Analysis is a reflective capacity during which practitioners create opportunities for sense-making to be undertaken alongside the young person, with their full participation. This requires practising attunement to strengthen participation (Hill and Warrington 2022), combining emotional engagement with analytical exploration. Further analysis continues when the young person is not present to reflect on what came up with them and about their situation and relationships, often in collaboration with managers, supervisors, or peers. Practitioners analyse connections between harms, including between those inside and outside the home, or between interpersonal harms, such as peer-on-peer abuse, and structural harms (Wroe and Pearce 2022; Billingham and Irwin-Rogers 2022). Practitioners must also be able to think and reflect in action (Schön 1992), which involves in-the-moment analysis as a situation of harm in the life of the young person develops. 

The aim of youth safeguarding is often defined in narrow terms as the prevention of harm to young people, perhaps because this is the primary focus for children’s social care (Maynard and Stuart 2018). We propose a broader aim: a purposeful multi-disciplinary collaboration to create safety with young people and to nurture their awareness, agency, and wellbeing. 

By using relational capacities for attunement and analysis, practitioners contribute to youth safeguarding by supporting young people to develop their awareness of themselves, of their experiences, relationships, and of the world around them. Young people’s agency is the ongoing growth of this awareness, as making choices and taking actions (Maynard and Stuart 2018), making and influencing decisions, engaging with the structures around them, and having influence in their own lives (Jerome and Starkey 2022). By enabling awareness and agency, practitioners enhance young people’s belief in their own capacity to stay safe and to promote their own wellbeing, while also creating safety in their relationships and in places and online spaces where actual or potential harm happens. We define wellbeing as an important aspect of human flourishing, which we characterise as both having human needs fulfilled and thinking and feeling positively about life (Billingham and Irwin-Rogers 2022).

While we place the development of a young person’s awareness, agency, and wellbeing at the heart of our understanding of relational practice, we do so with some caution. Owens and Lloyd highlight the problem of safeguarding responses that intend to prevent harm, but that expect individual young people to change their behaviour, and do not require professionals to create safety in places, online spaces, and relationships where harm happens (2023). It is in this spirit that we have chosen the term awareness over self-regulation. While supporting a young person to understand and regulate their own emotional experience is helpful, we believe that over-emphasis on self-regulation could place too much responsibility on the individual for reducing harm rather than understanding the interdependence between young people and professional services (Diaz-Diaz 2022). This narrative contributes to the responsibilisation of young people, whereby the responsibility for harm and social problems is transferred from the state to individuals and communities (Garland 2006, Peeters 2017). This transfer of responsibility recasts structural harm factors as personal failures. It may also blame a young person for their understandable emotional responses to harm and social injustice. 

Shifting the burden to individuals can leave young people in harmful situations without protection from abuse. It may also insinuate that young people who are exposed to structural harm and/or exploitation are the source of those harms or abuses, as in when the varied causes of interpersonal violence are collapsed into the category of ‘youth violence’ (Billingham and Irwin-Rogers 2022). Practitioners can instead use relational practice to create conditions for resonance with young people to support them to build their own awareness, agency, and wellbeing. Practitioners can do this without placing the onus on young people to alleviate the harms they endure (Beckett and Lloyd 2022) and in combination with activities that address the contexts of harm (Firmin 2017). To do this, all professionals in youth safeguarding systems, not only those in direct practice, benefit from support to build their awareness of how racism, biases, and wider forms of discrimination can prevent professionals from providing responses that promote young people’s welfare and safety (Davis 2022).     

As with the dimensions of relational practice that we discuss below, what Holmes (2022 p19) describes as a ‘both/and’ mindset is helpful: we can both support young people’s agency to navigate potential harm in their lives and recognise that we are responsible for strengthening relational networks of safe places and online spaces in their social environments. We must both work to understand multi-faceted aspects of a young person’s identity (Jajarmi et al 2025), including how structural discrimination can diminish a young person’s subjective wellbeing (Billingham and Irwin-Rogers 2022), and recognise that every young person needs nurture. 

2: Constraining forces and alienation in youth safeguarding systems

In this section, we outline several factors which impede relational practice, professional development, management, multi-agency collaboration, and leadership.

Doing relational practice with young people in youth safeguarding systems

Enacting both attunement and analysis with young people is complex for practitioners. Applying these capacities in relationships with young people who face harms requires balance and resourcefulness (Trevithick 2012). Using the capacity for attunement to support resonance is even more demanding when sustaining relationships with young people who hold memories of painful experiences, such as neglect or abuse, and remain  distressed in the present. 

Practitioners benefit from developing both attunement and analysis, which demands intellectual and emotional presence. Applying them in tandem is challenging, as is learning when and how to apply them, and some practitioners will feel more confident applying one than the other. We think developing both—and fine-tuning the dynamic balance for different situations—is a priority. This can involve feeling pressure in the moment to connect with a young person’s interests, identity, and circumstances, to follow the flow of relatedness while using emotional reasoning (Trevithick 2012), remaining alert to harms, and upholding an ethical stance on the young person’s rights to safety and welfare. Modulating between the capacities requires emotional, intellectual, and creative agility, and involves oscillating between forms of attentiveness that may be at odds: flexing between engagement and disengagement, feeling and thinking. Practitioners slide between modes, sometimes while in the presence of the aliveness of the young person. Pursuing effective practice can be exhausting with a young person who is experiencing trauma.

Resonance is a mode of relational responsiveness (Rosa 2019) in which both a person and the world around them are affected and changed. This helps to understand why using attunement and analysis can be so taxing, as they involve both emotional labour and affective labour: both allowing one’s own emotions to be influenced and influencing the emotions of another. As such, the practitioner's mind, body and emotions attune with the young person, which indicates another side to resonance: it opens the full spectrum of human experience, including dark and painful parts.

In this sense, practitioners use attunement to sustain empathy with a young person and avoid overt reactions in the presence of dark and painful thoughts and emotions, including when a young person seeks to provoke or harm the practitioner. Intense feelings toward the young person, their circumstances, and the harms they face may arise when switching between capacities. This involves challenging the young person’s actions and beliefs if these lead to an increase in potential harm to themself or to others, without breaking trust. The practitioner may have to soothe themself as they rip attention from attunement with the young person to analysis. For this reason, relational practice for youth safeguarding can be demanding on practitioner wellbeing and self-efficacy. Understanding that energetic demand is a significant gap in knowledge about—and conducive conditions for—relational practice in youth safeguarding systems. 

Professional learning and development for relational practice

The capacity for attunement in the here-and-now is about relational depth, a quality of the therapeutic relationship (DiMalta et al, 2024) that may contribute to resonance. Relational depth supports wellbeing beyond psychotherapy settings and may be facilitated via professional development. Developing the capacity for attunement enhances relational depth and complements practice, such as dialogue with the young person about the sense they make of their situation. It also establishes a rhythm of activity in spaces where the young person feels at ease. 

As an embodied practice, learning attunement requires experience and reflection in action (Schön 1992) and adaptability to young peoples’ realities. Some practitioners may develop this capacity in action more easily than others. We think social proximity of the practitioner to the young person affects attunement. This means practitioners may find that attuning with some young people happens more easily or swiftly than with others. Young people participating in research emphasise that relatability is a condition for developing relationships with practitioners (Millar et al 2023). Davis (2022) draws on Crenshaw (1991) to emphasise that practitioners must apply an intersectional lens to learn from how each young person’s biological and social characteristics ‘influence their everyday experiences, including the response they receive from professionals and services’ (Davis 2022 p119). This suggests that developing the capacity for attunement with young people, and responding to the significance of social relatability, requires examining our biases and ‘our perceptions of them, recognizing that this also shapes our response’ (p126). 

A further challenge with the capacity for attunement is that the better it is carried out, the less work it appears to be. Emotional work does not always look like work because it appears as part of the worker’s personality (Gotby 2023, xv). When attunement is not acknowledged as learned, emotional labour, it can have several demeaning effects, including inadequate pay and recognition and a patronising exoticisation of practitioners as ‘youth whisperers’. As with teaching assistants and learning mentors in some education settings, this condescension is often classed and racialised. The notion of ‘innate’ attunement capacity can imply that practitioners are by nature better at this capacity than others, diminishing the efforts of practitioners who work to build relational capacities and dissuading other practitioners from seeking to nurture them. The belief that someone has ‘innate’ capacity for analysis links to management and leadership potential, likewise classed and racialised, which may contribute to the under-representation of minoritised groups in the leadership of children’s services and youth work in England (ADCS 2025, NYA 2024).

Again, this requires a ‘both/and’ mindset. The capacity for attunement is grounded in tacit knowledge, embodied, and affected by a practitioner’s personality, making it difficult to grasp in the abstract. But it is also a capacity which can be honed through professional and personal experience, reflection, and supervision. Practitioners can participate in learning opportunities to strengthen their capacity for analysis. With proper support, practitioners will feel flexible and resourceful and able to deploy a repertoire of analytical tools to understand the young person’s situation and plan support together. Practitioners can use language and models for analysis which resonate with and make sense to those they are supporting, and they can collaborate with young people to carry out safety mapping, analysing risk in places, spaces, and relationships. Some practitioners feel more comfortable and confident than others in using analysis. 

Practitioners working with young people across healthcare, social work, teaching, youth work, housing services, and other areas are often expected to just do relational practice. Many practitioners sustain relationships for youth safeguarding with minimum guidance and professional development despite heavy caseloads, high stress levels, vicarious trauma, and onerous record-keeping and monitoring requirements. Increased attentiveness to the complexities of attunement and analysis by everyone working within youth safeguarding systems could raise awareness of the need for practitioner support and professional development.  

Managing and modelling relational practice

Practitioners in relational work with young people gain insight into young people’s realities, including at times of burgeoning safeguarding dilemmas. Acting on these harms has a significant emotional impact (Scott and Botcherby 2017). There are few spaces for managers to provide emotional support for practitioners in processing what they experience working with young people who face harms or to support the development of relational capacities. The concepts of holding environment (Winnicott 1960) and containment (Bion 1962) describe how professionals provide space for young people to think and feel and, in parallel, how supervisors provide thinking and feeling space for practitioners. Williams, Ruch, and Jennings stress the ‘central importance of containment in the face of the anxiety-ridden professional contexts [and] the need for participants to be permitted to be professionally vulnerable, in order to maintain a position of professional curiosity’ (2022, p19). As such, managers who tune into the realities of practitioners in their practice with young people offer a parallel form of resonance with practitioners. Put another way, ‘supporting supervisors to support practitioners, to support parents, so they can manage the anxiety they experience in order to enable them to provide care for their children’ (Williams et al 2022, p19).

Just as there are too few spaces for practitioners to reflect, so there are too few spaces for managers to enter dialogue about relational practice with other managers. Managers at all layers of youth safeguarding systems may be unable to participate in collaborative learning opportunities about the realities facing young people, their identities, peer groups, families, and communities, not least the impact of structural inequalities and disparities. There are likewise too few spaces for senior managers to reflect with each other on research, policy, and practice. In a recent interview, reflecting on her landmark 2011 report on child protection in England, Professor Eileen Munro contends that senior managers can become too detached from practice and ‘forget quite how messy and chaotic the reality of it is’ (Koutsounia 2024). This disconnect stems from the pervasive aversion to risk at all layers of our safeguarding systems, shaping practice, protocols, and structures, and preventing the deep attentiveness and emotional reasoning required for relational practice to flourish (Munro 2011, Trevithick 2014, MacAlister 2022). This is more challenging when conditions needed for enduring relationships are not established, and there are not enough resources to sustain those conditions (Firmin, Lefevre, Huegler and Peace 2022).

Consequently, a gap can open between practitioners who are upholding the welfare of young people whom they know well, and managers who may be compelled to ration limited resources, enforce harm reduction targets and cut prevention activities. This practical gap can, in turn, produce an emotional gap, and sometimes interpersonal tensions, not only between practitioner and manager, but also between the experiences of managers and those of young people and families. This gap may ‘lead to a defended system, where control and stability are prioritised over relationships with young people’ (Lloyd et al 2023, p13). 

For Rosa, alienation is a state where our relationship to other people and to the world ‘appears cold, rigid, repulsive, and non-responsive’ (2019, p184). We believe the emotional gap and interpersonal tensions are manifestations of alienation: the feeling of being cut off from the vibrant reality of others. For Rosa, this is the opposite of resonance, where we feel touched by and in meaningful dialogue with the world. A defended youth safeguarding system, and the detached proceduralism associated with it, is alienated from its aims. Instead of responsiveness, the system is marked by cold rigidity, eroding the capacity for resonance and creating conditions where practitioners feel disconnected from shared purpose and from the aliveness of young people.  

Relational practice in multi-disciplinary safeguarding

Another gap can open between managers from different sectors who have different levels of exposure to relational practice models. Owens and Lloyd describe the challenge of shifting mindsets from a behaviour-based approach to one focused on relational practice, collaboration, and creating safety with young people (2023). Partnership protocols may not acknowledge ‘differences in conceptual and ideological frameworks’ (p17) and managers from education, policing, social work, youth justice, and healthcare, among others, are not always supported to collaborate within a shared framework of principles and practice. 

Firmin and colleagues (2024) distinguish between young people and families who are ‘known-to-services’ and those who are ‘known-by-professionals’ who support them. This distinction reveals that responses focusing on the behaviour and choices of young people can reinforce ‘emotional, cultural and emotional distance between professionals and those in need of support’ (p7). In these situations, they continue, the

needs and experiences of young people and families were less relevant, and they did not appear to shape the plans put in place to support them [and] when young people are ‘known-to-services’, rather than ‘known-by-professionals’, plans developed to support them may be designed without much knowledge of, or conversation with, the young person. (Ibid)

Professionals reviewing the cases of young people and families who have been known-to-services rather than known-by-professionals for many years conclude that the support that young people and their families receive, even over several years, has ‘no effect’ (Firmin et al. 2024). This compounds stigma and discrimination, labelling young people and families as beyond help and diminishing the effort and reputations of practitioners who know them. 

Leading relational practice

Within youth safeguarding systems, ‘the practice or community conditions required for such relationships to flourish are yet to be firmly established’ (Firmin et al 2022, p42). In the experience of the first author (Colin), statutory safeguarding partners often commit to relational practice on paper through partnership strategies and improvement plans. However, this commitment can get lost in the pace and procedural demands of the operational management of youth safeguarding. Firmin and colleagues  (2022, p39) affirm that, ‘references to [relational] principles proliferated in studies examining practice interventions but [are] much less obvious in organisational or whole system approaches to addressing [harms outside of the home]’.Consequently, the aliveness of young people may not be tangible to strategic leaders who are themselves caught in an accelerated cycle of limiting resources and compliance. 

In our experience consulting with leaders in local safeguarding children partnerships (LSCP) in England, there is a prevalence of dialogue between leaders about youth safeguarding meetings. A common strategic action is to rearticulate the purpose, composition, frequency, scope, participation, and so on, of such meetings to reduce gaps and overlaps. Across England, overarching ambitions to promote wellbeing and flourishing are set out in these strategic documents. However, the words can appear tokenistic: strategic meetings refer to relational practice, but not its doing. Leadership groups can be constrained in reflecting on relational practice and on the conditions conducive to resonance and collaboration. In the putative focus on driving effectiveness in youth safeguarding systems, partnerships between leaders from different sectors and disciplines may limit themselves to performance data, information sharing, and the availability of resources. Strategic partnership groups can struggle to build momentum in applying learning, and to make relational practice present in youth safeguarding systems.

Fragmentation of shared narratives may feed the uncertainty and anxiety about relational practice. Skilled non-statutory practitioners, managers, and leaders from education and youth settings may not have opportunities to contribute to strategic youth safeguarding meetings. They receive requests for written information, but experience side-lining from dialogue and decision-making, and at worst, condescension from statutory partners. As a result, strategic leaders representing local partnerships—and those in regional and national organisations—slip into alienated forms of top-down decision-making, revealing a deficit in resonance and collaboration. Since safeguarding guidance is statutory, policy- and decision-makers at local, regional, and national leadership levels, may not permit collaborative or coproduced changes and improvements to that guidance. This can serve to limit access to knowledge and block the emergence of new learning, as that learning may appear to leaders as a threat to the established order of compliance and proceduralism. 

In summary, several factors constrain practitioners, managers, and leaders from developing their capacities for relational practice. Resonant relationships between professionals and, crucially, between those in direct practice with young people are fundamental to youth safeguarding systems. When used effectively in tandem, the capacities of attunement and analysis can support relational depth between practitioners and young people, enriching young people’s awareness, agency, and wellbeing. We now turn to describing the creation of conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration between everyone involved, and to enable relational practice in youth safeguarding. 

3: Conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration in youth safeguarding systems

We offer the framework above to help practitioners, managers, leaders, policymakers and researchers to explore the conditions for resonance, collaboration and relational practice at each layer of youth safeguarding systems. We emphasise that the framework makes no prescriptions for policy: we do not aim to elaborate principles for practice that must underpin youth safeguarding. We combine its elements to support thinking beyond sector and discipline. After a year of testing and dialogue with practitioners from across disciplines and roles, we recommend the framework to strengthen the case for creating conducive conditions. 

Again, we invite a ‘both/and’ mindset: attending both to a young person’s realities and harms, and focusing on their awareness, agency and wellbeing. We invite leaders to apply this mindset in thinking about conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration. Managers need to consider both conducive conditions for practitioners to develop attunement and analysis, and to fine-tune the balance between the two. Managers would apply both attunement and analysis with practitioners, modelling relational practice, in parallel with practitioners’ work with young people.

Organisational context: both allocation and adaptation

In part one, we propose two capacities—attunement and analysis—which we think are the key conditions for resonance and relational practice with young people. When it comes to management, we propose that the first key condition is the allocation of dedicated space and time for professional development to cultivate these two capacities. This gives permission to spend time working with young people. When creating this condition, managers consider the complexity of the work, the practitioner’s capacity, and the need for reflective supervision and professional development (LGA 2024). 

Managers also create the second key conducive condition: the adaptation of service delivery to the learning emerging from practice. This would mean recognising the need for flexibility and for eschewing a procedural mindset, so that practitioners can work to develop the capacity for attunement. This will allow managers to make the learning emerging from practice visible and tangible in their reporting to senior managers and strategic leaders within youth safeguarding systems. This entails recognition of practice wisdom gained by practitioners through direct practice, and willingness to facilitate co-production of change to guidance and strategies.

Professional development would include reflective practice, supported through guidance, observation, debriefings, and supervision. Allocation and adaptation would create conditions to focus on developing attunement and analysis, and applying these capacities to make sense of the young person’s aliveness and relationships. Reflective practice helps to make sense of practice experiences. Allocation and adaptation create conditions that prevent practitioners from becoming disillusioned, burned out and alienated. In turn, senior managers create conditions that aim to prevent disillusionment, burnout, and alienation in those responsible for managing direct practice.

Multi-agency context: both authority and alignment

We propose that in youth safeguarding systems, leaders create conditions for resonance and collaboration by giving authority to managers and practitioners to prioritise nurturing young people’s awareness, agency and wellbeing via the development of relational capacities. This would make relational practice a core function across all multi-agency, multi-disciplinary partnerships, services and teams. 

David Armstrong (2005) has proposed that a ‘neglected function of leadership’ is making present, which he describes as an ‘act of discernment, of bringing into view and articulating what is often tacit’ (p133). Armstrong emphasises that to discern the most valuable ‘goods’ within an organisation, leaders reflect on examples of excellence in the  skills essential to practice (p130). We propose that it is crucial for leaders of youth safeguarding systems to reflect on attunement, analysis, resonance and collaboration as the valuable ‘goods’ of the system, and to recognise that ‘it is the practice that breathes life into the organisation’ (p131). Armstrong argues that leadership ‘secures and selects resources’ so that ‘goods and conceptions’ internal to practice can be ‘realised and extended’ (p132). This emphasis on authority for securing resources so that the benefits of practice can be realised is echoed by Doherty and de St Croix in the context of supporting youth work:

conditions for high quality youth work centre on […] long-term investment, support for professional training and education, the valuing of staff through decent contracts, and halting the sale of buildings and the closure of popular grassroots facilities […] rebuilding of an adequate and proportional youth work sector that is able to have an everyday value and a remarkable impact on young people’s lives. (Doherty and de St Croix 2019)

This would require leaders to give authority for the use of critical thinking for the alignment of practice frameworks within youth safeguarding systems. This alignment would support critical examination of professional development approaches that bolster strong professional identities and practice for youth safeguarding (Williams et al 2022). 

Conclusion

In this paper, we assert the importance of re-balancing responsibilities for relational practice in youth safeguarding systems. The research is clear: trusted relationships are crucial for reducing harm in young people’s lives. We suggest there are three major factors preventing relationships from flourishing. First, widespread uncertainty and anxiety about defining relational practice. Second, there is too often an expectation that practitioners ‘just do’ relational practice. Third, there remain forces of proceduralism, individualism, and alienation, which act as defensive responses to the uncontrollability of harms (Rosa 2018). This undermines the conditions needed for relational practice. As such, we argue that everyone within youth safeguarding systems will benefit from understanding the constraints and enablers of relational practice.

We anchor young people’s safety, awareness, agency and wellbeing as the primary aims of youth safeguarding, and place focus of policy and practice on young people’s realities, identities, relationships, and experiences. We argue that supporting practitioners to develop the capacities for attunement and analysis is crucial to the success of relational practice. The vitality of youth safeguarding extends beyond the scope of any one sector or discipline, which highlights the importance of resonance and collaboration within and between multi-agency teams, services, and partnerships. We believe that youth safeguarding is relational at its core, and flourishes when relational approaches are tangible at each layer of our systems. We propose creating space and time for the development of capacities of attunement and analysis with attention to systemic and intersectional perspectives, so that practitioners, managers, leaders, and policymakers can contribute to creating conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration.

For operational management and multi-agency leadership, we call for urgent commitment to cultivate relational practitioners. This commitment means that managers need to be able to allocate resources to support practitioners to be agile, adapting their responses to young people. This would enhance the development of relational depth, supported by space and time for reflective practice, professional development, and effective leadership. In turn, this approach would make relational practice present as the core function of youth safeguarding systems, in service of nurturing young people’s awareness, agency and wellbeing. 

Relationships are what we all live for. Within youth safeguarding systems, resonance—between professionals and young people, as well as among professionals—can be what keeps a young person alive. But no relationship occurs in a vacuum: every relationship needs conducive conditions to flourish. 

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