The need for relationship-based, trauma-informed connections in children’s social care

Developing a practice model for children’s services must include shared values for children and families, and for staff, Dr Marie Kershaw, told a seminar at the COMPASS Jobs Fair in Birmingham.

Dr Kershaw, who is head of Psychologically Informed Practice at Birmingham Children’s Trust, said: “We are a really large and diverse organisation, covering 46 different service areas. So our challenge is how to get one model that honours and respects the work of all these different services areas?

“We wanted one framework, one set of core principles, that speaks to anybody within the organisation, whether working in family-facing services or one of our crucial support services.

“It had to speak not just to family practitioners but to the whole trust, to our culture, our leadership, and our approach to staff well-being.”

The answer was Connections Count, a relationship-based trauma-informed system-wide approach.

Dr Kershaw said: “The good news is, much of what you will see in the model is not new……. [staff] are already doing it. We are aiming to join the dots, to more explicitly name the ‘golden threads’ of practice that need to remain consistent.

“In children’s social care we often talk about structural inequality, disadvantage, poverty, and the impact that can have -- especially in the early years.

“Adversity and its impact is only really half the story. Adversity creates vulnerability for those families. What are the counter-conditions that we need to proactively create in order to help children to thrive?’

“In a nutshell it is practice [that] encourages us to realise the impact of early adversity and inter-generational trauma on people. This shows up not just in families but in organisations, teams, and in systems. When the system gets stressed, we start to get pulled into fire-fighting ways of doing and being rather than more reflective methods.”

She said that the guiding principle came from the US psychiatrist Bruce Perry, who said: “Your history of connectedness to your family, community and culture is more predictive of your mental health than your history of adversity.’”

“That is huge,” Dr Kershaw commented, adding that the Trust is also looking at people’s capability and capacity to form and maintain supportive relationships.

“We know people don’t all have those opportunities, especially when we think about things like inter-generational trauma; when parents who themselves may be young care leavers, or who may never have had that model of how to support and nurture and parent their children.

“So what do we then need to be doing to support people to build those networks to be able to help them thrive?

“The more we understand about early childhood trauma, the more we can proactively work together to create the counter-conditions needed to create positive change, resilience and recovery.”

She described the practice model under headings of “How we ‘Be’ – the heart of our relational approach -- what we do, and what we achieve.”

“The aim is to provide a clear and consistent language and a set of principles for practice that is sensitive to, and respectful of needs. It ensures a continuous focus on children’s experiences and progress.

“It also supports us to build and maintain healthy relationships, reduce risk and work together to create positive change.

“While this is a model for ‘Practice’, it also has to speak to colleagues who are not in family facing roles. We also have to model this through our leadership. Leadership that shows compassion and pays attention to its workforce is going to be better for you working in the organisation.

Children were invited to help design the trust logo – the result was a mandala with the child at its centre. ‘One of the big things we try to do is model around collaboration and empowerment. So children helped design the model and they chose the mandala. They helped us design all the animations and the graphics and the voices in our animations are the voices of our staff and children in care as well.

“So many of our families lose space for hope and for joy. Trauma robs us of imagination to be creative and to see how things could be different in the future.

“At a mental health conference I went to a while ago, a panel discussed the one thing that was needed to support children’s and young people’s mental health; a young care leaver on the panel said ‘I need you to be the holder of my hope, when I am not strong enough to be able to hold it for myself. I need you to hold it safely in your hands, and then when I am strong enough, I need you to give it back to me and help me to hold it for myself.’ Those words still give me goose-bumps.”