RELATIONAL PRACTICE IN CHANGING SYSTEMS: FAMILIES FIRST REFORMS
At SHiFT, one of our Practice Principles is to “Hold and Pull for Help” and this is precisely the ethos behind holding these conversations around the implementation of the social care reforms for children who are teenagers.
I wholeheartedly support the goals of the Families First reforms, though I initially found it challenging to envision their practical application, especially for the children we work with at SHiFT. Children taking part in SHiFT are often teenagers, often experiencing harm outside the home and inside the home, and are often coming into contact with the justice systems: being arrested, going to court or sometimes ending up in secure settings or prison.
The children we work with are old enough to have agency and voice in a way that much younger children or babies do not and whilst they have experienced harm and exploitation we are also thinking about how we can prevent them causing harm to others, at the same time as protecting them.
Whilst tricky, these dilemmas are not new, and hopefulness comes from speaking with practitioners and leaders who are out there doing the work, staying in this complexity daily and tenaciously chasing better outcomes for children. It was with this hopefulness that I wanted to create a shared space to connect over dilemmas and share learning, ideas and hope around what we can keep doing in practice, and what opportunities and obstacles the Families
First reforms might offer us in this work. I would like to give thanks to all the voices who contributed in the workshops, in particular Charlotte Matthews from Camden and to the SHiFT team for helping facilitate conversations and bring these ideas to life.
With thanks,
Hilary Dixon, Director of Practice and Learning
In conversation | 8 key themes
SHiFT has been hosting conversations with practitioners, researchers and leaders working at the intersection of children’s social care, youth justice and adolescent safeguarding to explore where teenagers sit within the Families First reforms. What emerged were recurring themes: reforms designed with younger children in mind, workforce and relationship continuity under strain, and cautious hope that local innovation could shape what comes next.
Adolescents are the cohort affected by the most simultaneous reform activity: social care, SEND, NHS, justice and policing, adult transitions, local government reorganisation, and yet have no single point of national leadership.
The architecture of the reforms still assumes the harm is at home. Where harm is extra-familial, the reform’s core mechanisms: family help, family group decision-making and parenting support, don’t reach the causes of harm, and can tansfer responsibility for community harm onto families.
Everyone interviewed welcomed multi-agency child protection teams in principle but also warned that a new team does not neccesarily mean new practice. Teams making child protection decisions understand adolescent development, extra-familial harm and community risk.
There was genuine enthusiasm for alternatively qualified practitioners in the Families First model
“there are great people out there who are not social-work qualified but can do the job”, paired with a caution that specialist knowledge and supervision must follow them.
It was also felt that the cliff edge at 18 is a fundamental flaw that can undo all the work done prior. The point was pushed beyond service design: the 18 cut-off is “a conceptual, societal matter as much as a legislative one, akin to when we decided twelve-year-olds shouldn’t be sent up chimneys. We can’t get there by fiddling around with which worker can continue past a birthday.”
Interviewees described mixed workforce feeling about the reform with both both “Anxiety about the uncertainty of what this is going to look like, combined with some hope that maybe this is an opportunity to do things differently.
One warning was voiced with force: in the current climate around ‘violence-fixated individuals’, a decade’s progress on seeing children as children first is at risk with worry that public opinion and fear could influence more punitive, risk-averse responses from practitioners.
There was a real sense of hope and optimism. Some of the areas of hopefulness included: local area leading national policy, creative, community- anchored practice that already exists and an opening for alternativley qualified practitioners.
Roundtables | 8 key themes
These discussions brought together leaders and practitioners from children’s social care, youth justice, education, health and local authorities to explore how the social care reforms can better meet the needs of adolescents, particularly those experiencing exploitation, extra-famiial harm, offending, care experience and complex trauma. Across both sessions, there was a strong consensus that systems need to move away from crisis-driven, procedural responses towards relational, preventative and communiy-based approaches.
This roundtable event was held across London and Manchester over two days
System fragmentation and the postcode lottery. Adolescents are underrepresented in current reform design, which is still built around younger children and intra-familial harm. Support varies hugely by council and court, with siloed data systems preventing a joined-up view of a child's story — a call was made for a mandated, consistent national baseline.
Legislative blind spots are failing exploited children. The National Referral Mechanism and Section 45 defence aren't working as intended , police are often reluctant to use them for serious offences, and lengthy court delays leave children and families "in limbo," with professionals sometimes unable to act until sentencing.
Race, disproportionality and anti-racist practice. Strong concern was raised about Black and mixed-heritage children facing a "double-ended" harm: minimised when harmed outside the home, but met with more punitive responses when harm happens inside it. Participants called for reforms to explicitly tackle this rather than treat it as secondary, and to disrupt the "adultification" of Black and Brown boys.
Extra-familial harm needs community and online-aware responses. Because much adolescent harm happens through peer groups, online spaces and criminal exploitation, contextual safeguarding needs to become standard practice, with online activity built into routine assessments , while families and kinship networks remain a key protective resource that the system should support more flexibly (e.g. moving kinship care out of fostering regulations).
Meet families where they already are, and address root causes. There was a strong push to invest in existing community and grassroots spaces rather than new statutory hubs, and to focus more directly on perpetrators of harm (even where they're over 18) rather than placing the burden of safety solely on the child or family.
Relational practice as the throughline. Authentic relationships, curiosity over judgement, and understanding a child's lived experience came through as the strongest shared principle including recognising that harmful behaviour is a form of communication, using formulation/re-formulation to avoid fixing a child's identity, and accepting that trust after "broken authority" takes time to rebuild.
Workforce retention underpins everything. Burnout, fear, and inconsistent support for practitioners were named as fundamental threats to relational practice ("if you don't have staff retention you cannot have relational practice in the way it is intended"). There was also a push to break down hierarchies between differently-qualified staff and to share tools and learning across regions.
The post-18 cliff edge, and practical examples of what's working. The sharp transition to adult services , especially around housing . was flagged as a major gap, with strong support for extending protection to 25 (as Camden is trialling). Concrete practice examples were shared as models: iVision's three-part safeguarding approach (relational work with parents, joint safety planning, and disrupting perpetrators), prison-based work at HMP Forest Bank, and Lifelong Links reconnecting care-experienced young people.
What next?
Interpret Families First as a team around the worker for adolescents, protecting relationship
continuity (Camden YJS)
Embed adolescent specialists into kinship care teams (Croydon) and A&E/hospital navigators into
critical moments (Redthread)
Put in place reflective spaces and group supervision that slow decisions and surface power, race
and complexity
Provide systemic training in formulation and re-formulation, so professionals hold multipl hypotheses rather than fixing a child's identity
Invest in existing community spaces and grassroots organisations rather than new hubs, and pay
smaller organisations for their time (Coventry mentoring consortium)
Build community-based safety around extra-familial harm, rather than rule-based safety plans that gather evidence against families
Make online life a routine part of every assessment
Use CCE/CSE plans instead of CP plans where more helpful
Prioritise earlier intervention through schools, and extend support past 18 in practice where possible
Strengthen anti-racist practice to disrupt the adultification of Black and mixed-heritage boys
An integrated, cross-department roadmap (DfE, MoJ, DHSC, Health, policing) to end "reform-itus" and give adolescents a single point of national leadership.
Specific national guidance for adolescents and extra-familial harm within the reforms.
Online harm and protective factors written into assessment guidance.
A mandated minimum baseline of support to end the postcode lottery, with clearer escalation routes for unacceptable delays (mental health, speech and language, neurodivergence, substance use).
Investment in the workforce with a focus on standards and guidance on therapeutic support, clinical supervision and retention evidence.
Greater investment in disruption work with those causing harm aged 18–25.
Consistent national financial support for kinship carers, with a move of kinship care into Family Help rather than fostering
Education recognised and mandated as the fourth statutory safeguarding partner, so children benefit from a genuinely joined up and equally responsible safeguarding network.
Reform of the National Referral Mechanism and the Section 45 defence, so they function as intended for exploited children in serious cases rather than being treated as a paper exercise.
Extending rights, protection and services to age 25 for young people experiencing harm, because harm, trauma and brain development don't stop at 18 even though the mechanisms to intervene often do.
Raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14 or 16, in line with international standards and a welfare-first approach to children.