Conducive Conditions for Resonance and Collaboration in Youth Safeguarding Systems
Author: Colin Michel, Co-Founder of Resonant Collaboration.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Centre for Safer Society.
What is blocking collective authority and system alignment?
This blog explores what might be blocking collective authority and system alignment, including how several factors conspire to divert attention from relational practice.
What is a “youth safeguarding system”?
The aims of a youth safeguarding system are: to create safety with young people exposed to harms and abuse; to prevent further harm; and to nurture young people’s awareness, agency and wellbeing. In this way, the phrase “youth safeguarding system” has two definitions. Firstly, it is a description of the relationships, places, online spaces, and services around young people that shape harm and safety and the interconnectedness between those relationships. Secondly, it is an aspiration for purposeful collaboration.
Defining collective authority and system alignment
To be effective in achieving these aims, purposeful multi-disciplinary collaborations require both collective authority and system alignment.
Collective authority is shared authorisation sustained across a multi-agency partnership to prioritise nurturing young people’s awareness, agency and wellbeing through relational capacities. It allows practitioners and managers to act with confidence rather than defaulting to procedural compliance, and takes place within statutory duties, regulatory expectations, resourcing constraints and political scrutiny.
System alignment is the capacity of leaders working in different agencies to hold shared purpose and problems in view, while working within different disciplines and from different standpoints. Where system alignment is in place, the partnership can name what professionals are noticing and learning, work through that learning together, and carry it into the practice of each agency in collaborative partnership.
These definitions have at least four important implications:
First, placing the nurture of young people’s awareness, agency and wellbeing at the core of safeguarding, without placing undue responsibility on young people for preventing or reducing harm.
Second, recognising networks of non-professional relationships (such as friends and family members) in young people’s lives as crucial for youth safeguarding.
Third, emphasising that youth safeguarding extends beyond any one organisation, sector or discipline, making collaboration essential.
Fourth, the term system foregrounds interrelatedness, ongoing change, and wider contexts of harm, such as austerity, poverty and racism; all of which requires curiosity and flexibility from policymakers, leaders, managers and practitioners.
Relational practice depends upon both collective authority and system alignment as conducive conditions at partnership level. Where collective authority and system alignment are weaker, relational practice becomes harder to sustain as a shared priority between sectors. This means learning and practice development stay within agencies and systems fragment, losing collective focus on nurturing young people’s awareness, agency and wellbeing.
Relational practice confusion
The evidence says that trusted relationships between practitioners and young people form a crucial foundation for youth safeguarding (Lewing et al, 2018; Commission on Young Lives, 2022; Lloyd et al, 2023). There is also growing recognition that relationships between professionals have a profound influence on the difference that youth safeguarding makes.
Despite this, many people working across this field describe professional uncertainty and anxiety about what relational practice involves (Lamph et al, 2023). Relational practice is poorly defined and is described differently between sectors. Confusingly, there are also overlapping models for practice, such as strength-based, trauma-informed, and restorative approaches (TCE 2023). A decade-and-a-half of austerity has driven competition for scarce resources, contributing to professional hesitancy and fear.
Resonance in youth safeguarding
In response to uncertainty about relational practice, Hartmut Rosa’s idea of resonance names something people recognise in day-to-day work: relationships that feel genuine, responsive and alive, where both people are affected, and where the outcome cannot be fully controlled in advance (Rosa 2019; 2020).
In youth safeguarding, resonance helps us name the two-way quality of being with a young person in a way that stays connected to what is happening for the young person, and to what is happening between the professional and the young person.
Resonance’s opposite, Alienation, names what can happen when systems harden under pressure. Practice can start to feel cold, rigid, and driven by compliance and/or performance. Responsiveness drains from relationships and professionals can feel detached from young people, and from each other.
Resonance supports connectedness while being with a young person, and responding flexibly to their needs and desires. It enables empathy and comprehension of a young person’s experiences (Gilkerson and Pryce 2021), sharpening sensitivity to emotional feedback loops (Hollenstein 2015) between feelings, thoughts and reflections, and to the aliveness of the young person as a thinking, feeling human being.
This helps make meaning while responding to thoughts, feelings, words and people. This includes young people’s relation to themselves, their multi-faceted identities (Jajarmi et al 2025) to people, places and online spaces in their lives. It also includes harmful situations they face, inequalities, intersectionality, and disproportionality that compounds these harms.
It’s also crucial to step back and think about the young person’s strengths, relationships and situations from several angles (Munro 2011). This involves sensemaking, using information and dialogue to think through what changes might shift a young person’s situation in a positive direction, including in response to actual or potential harms, and whenever possible alongside the young person. Practice can pull in different directions: practitioners modulate between engagement and stepping back, feeling and thinking. Resonance is complex and demanding, and without support can lead to disillusionment, burnout and alienation.
Constraining forces: where systems block resonance in youth safeguarding
Several forces can constrain resonance in youth safeguarding systems. For practitioners, relationships can be psychologically, physically and emotionally demanding. Practitioners are expected to respond with minimal guidance, within inflexible or conflicting procedures, high workloads and considerable pressures.
For managers, focus can narrow onto caseloads, procedural compliance, and risk management, limiting investment in relationships. When managers lack time and permission to reflect with practitioners, and with each other, the system loses spaces for processing and practice development.
For leaders, the aliveness of young people and the realities of their relationships with practitioners can get lost from view amid resource constraints, silo-working, media scrutiny and reactive politics. A gap opens between practitioners, managers, leaders, and policymakers. In these circumstances, collective authority and system alignment can appear as extra demands.
What might be stalling alignment in collaboration?
When thinking about resonance, system alignment might mean slowing down and noticing how relationships and outcomes are sustained or constrained: Who is involved? What pressures are constraining practice? What patterns keep repeating across youth safeguarding systems? Where might changes to conditions enable more responsiveness?
If system alignment feels difficult to take up in statutory services, that difficulty can point to the nature of working conditions facing leaders, managers and practitioners in youth safeguarding systems.
Seven barriers to system alignment observed in youth safeguarding systems:
1. Framework fad fatigue
Over the years, leaders across the helping professions have sailed the waves of many initiatives and practice models, so it follows that “new” frameworks might elicit a little cynicism.
When agencies cannot allocate protected time and permission for sensemaking, system alignment can appear little more than a fancy phrase. “New” frameworks land with middle-managers, who may feel too far from seniority to make service-wide changes, but close enough to know the need for change, contributing to management fatigue.
2. We already do this, don’t we?
Approaches based in strengths, trauma, attachment, relationships, and systems, are well known to children’s services: leaders might say, in good faith, that social work has systems covered. While children’s services hold sophisticated thinking about families, contemporary safeguarding also means schools, peer groups, neighbourhoods, online spaces, transport and beyond (Firmin 2017).
This wider picture cannot be held by any single agency, nor every part of any one agency, nor contained in strategy documents. Without opportunities for sharing learning across partners, the conversation might well end prematurely.
3. Statutory duty means accountability
Senior leaders in children’s social care, health and policing carry distinctive legal and regulatory duties. This is further complicated by the differences between the professional cultures and priorities of the three statutory safeguarding partners (DfE 2023). In this context, system alignment can be perceived as dilution of accountability: if responsibility is distributed across partners, where does accountability sit when something goes wrong?
The critical issue is creating conducive conditions for collective authority: where leaders are held responsible for risk without the authority to change conditions, defaulting to procedural compliance becomes more likely.
4. “System” language gets muddled
Words like “system” can sound abstract and unmoored from practice realities. System alignment, as this blog defines it, is easily confused with other uses of “system”, for instance systems change programmes aimed at shifting structures and resources, and family systems or systemic therapeutic traditions in social work.
While each use has meaning, when system means many things at once, it loses precision and usefulness and people tune out. The task is to establish collective authority and to align language and aims across disciplines, to identify what needs to change in day-to-day practice across youth safeguarding systems.
5. “Known-to-services” or “known-by” practitioners
Most children are not known-by social work teams; some may be known to services through data and casework without being held in enduring professional relationships (Firmin et al 2024). Meanwhile education, youth, community and some healthcare colleagues may hold more live knowledge of a young person’s strengths, routines, relationships and harm.
Youth safeguarding systems may talk about system alignment while relying mainly on what is legible to statutory processes, rather than what happens in day-to-day life. If schools, youth and community settings hold the richest understanding, that knowledge must move from periphery to core in youth safeguarding systems.
6. Narrow definitions
When system alignment is reduced to “services coming together”, it can become about meetings, protocols and pathways. The lived youth safeguarding system can drop out of view: the relationships, places and online spaces where harm and safety take shape. Information sharing cannot stand in for shared sensemaking, and system alignment cannot live in documents rather than in practice. Strategic leaders need ways of keeping in view the real lives of young people and the realities of practice at the heart of decision-making.
7. System alignment can be misapplied, and it can also be applied usefully
System alignment language can be used to avoid decisions, blur accountability, or produce endless mapping activities that never shift practice. In these moments, precision matters: staying close to real lives, real constraints and real decision-making. Focus on creating conducive conditions to strengthen the capacity for learning, collaboration and relational practice.
Across the different barriers described above, common issues reappear: the conditions for shared sensemaking and learning across partnerships are weak, and system alignment flounders. This can contribute to professional reluctance to participate in future efforts at collective authority and system alignment.
Conclusion: sustaining collective authority and system alignment
Creating conducive conditions for professionals to learn together across practice, management, and leadership in youth safeguarding systems is demanding. This may be especially true in statutory contexts shaped by law, inspection, resource constraints and political scrutiny.
Collective authority and system alignment are key conditions for the effectiveness of youth safeguarding partnerships under pressure. Collective authority sustains permission across partnerships, within expectations, constraints and scrutiny, to prioritise nurturing young people’s awareness, agency and wellbeing. System alignment is the collective capacity to hold purpose and problems across agencies, so that professionals can notice and learn, process across a partnership. With these in place, practitioners and managers can focus on relational practice, rather than defaulting to procedural compliance.
In practice, collective authority and system alignment show up where practice and purpose are front-of-mind. Where time is protected for attunement, analysis and shared sensemaking. Where what is learned from practice with young people is noticed, talked about and applied to guidance and everyday ways of working; permission and decision-making are clear across roles, agencies and partnerships.
Within youth safeguarding systems, resonance between professionals and young people, and among professionals, can be what keeps a young person alive. No relationship occurs in a vacuum: every relationship needs conducive conditions to flourish.
If youth safeguarding systems are to be imbued with strong collaboration between services and between individual practitioners, it is crucial that they nurture collective authority and system alignment.
About the blog: This blog draws on an article written with Luke Billingham, based on our realities in roles as researchers, safeguarding consultant (Colin) and youth worker (Luke).
With thanks to Luke Billingham, Lucy Cavell and Rachel Ringham whose careful reading and thoughtful comments improved this blog.
Colin Michel
Colin Michel is a facilitator, researcher, and consultant with over 20 years’ experience in children’s services. He co-founded Resonant Collaboration, focusing on youth safeguarding and relational practice. A PhD candidate at the University of Sussex, his research examines how youth workers collaborate to create safety with young people.
References
Commission on Young Lives (2022) Hidden in Plain Sight: Final Report.
Department for Education (DfE) (2023) Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023. London: Department for Education.
Firmin, C. (2017) Contextual Safeguarding: An Overview of the Conceptual Framework and a Practice Tool for Addressing Extra-Familial Harm. London: Contextual Safeguarding Network.
Firmin, C., Langhoff, K., Eyal-Lubling, R., Maglajlic, R.A. and Lefevre, M. (2024) '“Known to services” or “Known by professionals”: Relationality at the core of trauma-informed responses to extra-familial harm', Children and Youth Services Review, 160, 107595.
Gilkerson, L. and Pryce, J. (2021) 'The mentoring FAN: a conceptual model of attunement for youth development settings', Journal of Social Work Practice, 35(3), pp. 315–330.
Hollenstein, T. (2015) 'This Time, It’s Real: Affective Flexibility, Time Scales, Feedback Loops, and the Regulation of Emotion', Emotion Review, 7.
Jajarmi, H., Al Abdwani, T., Amirsheibani, M., Yo’ldoshev O.A., Al Bulushi, I.S. and Yuldashev, M. (2025) 'Identity’s Multifaceted Nature: An Integrated Framework'.
Lamph, G., Nowland, R., Boland, P. et al. (2023) 'Relational practice in health, education, criminal justice, and social care: a scoping review', Systematic Reviews, 12, 194.
Lewing, B., Beervers, T. and Acquah, D. (2018) 'Building trusted relationships for vulnerable children and young people with public services'. Early Intervention Foundation.
Lloyd, J., Hickle, K., Owens, R. and Peace, D. (2023) 'Relationship-based practice and contextual safeguarding: approaches to working with young people experiencing extra-familial risk and harm', Children & Society, pp. 1–17.
Michel, C. & Billingham, L. (2024) Creating conducive conditions for resonance and collaboration: Re-thinking relational practice in youth safeguarding systems. Resonant Collaboration.
Munro, E. (2011) The Munro Review of Child Protection: Final Report – A Child-Centred System. London: Department for Education.
Rosa, H. (2019) Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rosa, H. (2020) The Uncontrollability of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Tackling Child Exploitation (TCE) Programme (2023) Practice Principles: Be Strength-Based and Relationship-Based.