Introduction

Since 2008, the number of children looked after (CLA) by local authorities in England has surged, reaching a record high of 83,760 in 2023 (Department for Education 2024). At the same time, there has been a widening of inequalities between the most and least deprived local authorities, with poorer areas experiencing a disproportionate increase in children taken into care (Bennett et al. 2020). Socioeconomic factors, including rising levels of child poverty and austerity policies resulting in under-resourced services for children, may be intensifying these inequalities. As Bywaters et al. (2016) also point out, the interaction between racial and economic structures is crucial in understanding and addressing disparities.

For most CLA, moving into care may be a traumatic and stressful event (Broadhurst and Mason 2020; Humphreys 2019; Lamponen, Pösö, and Burns 2019), causing emotional distress, guilt, disrupted attachment, and anxiety, often worsened by the separation circumstances (Baugerud and Melinder 2012). This means that practitioners who support children at their point of entry into the care system face a dual challenge. As well as protecting children from the risk of harm or abuse, they must take steps to mitigate the potential for further trauma caused by the separation.

Current statutory guidance on child safeguarding (HM Government 2023) explains agency powers for child removal and mandates a multi-agency, child-centred approach. However, it lacks practical guidance on enacting separations, addressing trauma, and providing safety planning or post-separation support. The guidance offers little support for practitioners involved in what is arguably the most emotionally complex and consequential mandated intervention to safeguard a child. These gaps underscore the necessity for specific guidance on how to support both practitioners and children during the transition.

The ‘Child Coming into Our Care’ (CCIOC) project aims to address these gaps by centring the child’s lived experience of separation and developing trauma-informed practice guidance for practitioners. Funding from a Teaching Partnership programme supported this research project exploring the integration of CCIOC guidance in multi-agency planning meetings. The CCIOC approach is specifically designed to mitigate the immediate trauma experienced by children at the point of separation from their families. The primary purpose of a CCIOC meeting is to support and plan this transition in a way that is both effective and trauma-informed, recognizing that the initial separation is often the most emotionally intense and least supported phase of the care journey. While it is acknowledged that trauma may persist well beyond this initial stage, the framework aims to reduce distress at the outset through careful, compassionate planning. Although long-term outcomes are not the direct focus of this study, it is anticipated that early trauma-informed interventions such as CCIOC may contribute positively to children’s longer-term experiences of care and separation.

In this article, we aim to give an overview of practitioner perspectives on how the CCIOC guidelines have worked in practice, focusing on the potential to improve outcomes for children.

The CCIOC project and approach

The CCIOC project originated out of the shared concern of two social workers that the steps being taken by practitioners to protect children from emotional distress during their transition into the care of the local authority tended to be based on personal judgement rather than on any established protocols. Our subsequent literature search confirmed the lack of national guidance addressing the lived experience of children during the separation from their families. As previous research shows, gaps in training, guidance and supervision can leave social workers feeling deskilled, overwhelmed and less prepared when dealing with the complexity of the situations they often encounter in the course of their work (Hunt et al. 2016; Kwhali et al. 2016; Ravalier et al. 2021).

To address this issue, the Team Manager formed a multi-disciplinary working group including a Clinical Psychologist, a Children’s Guardian, practitioners from the Emergency Duty Team, and a social work academic from a local university. Over a series of working group meetings, they developed practice guidance for how to plan the process of children coming into care in a way that centred the unique needs of each child and the likely impact of being separated from their families and homes. The CCIOC framework aimed to ensure that the child/ren remained at the centre of every planning process so that significant adults and professionals in the child’s life had preparation in place to minimize disruption and carry out the separations in a compassionate, trauma-informed manner. The CCIOC framework encourages all practitioners to consider the potential for children to suffer psychological harm as a direct result of being separated from their families. The framework is based on eight key principles designed to improve the support children receive during the separation: multi-agency planning, ensuring children’s safety, working in partnership with families, maintaining ongoing family relationships, effective information sharing, trauma-informed practices, practitioner support, and the provision of necessary resources.

Literature review

Separation as a traumatic event

Separation from families is a potentially traumatic event, compounding the initial harm that triggered the involvement of protective services (Baugerud and Melinder 2012; English, Thompson, and White 2015; Melinder et al. 2013). The child’s disrupted attachment to primary caregivers undermines their sense of security and stability (Bowlby 2010; Humphreys 2019). Unplanned separations in acute situations increase stress and emotional reactions (Baugerud and Melinder 2012). The child’s age is also a crucial factor, with separations that happen between the ages of three and five years more likely to generate lasting insecurity (Crittenden and Spieker 2023).

Early experiences of abuse may hinder a child’s ability to recall and process traumatic events, potentially disrupting the psychological task of ‘working through’ their experiences. Such difficulties in emotional and cognitive integration are often linked to an increased vulnerability to long-term psychological challenges that can persist into adulthood (Melinder et al. 2013; Van der Kolk 2014).

What helps in addressing the impact of separation trauma?

Research on addressing the traumatic impacts of familial separation is limited, especially in the UK. However, some studies identify factors that may mitigate the impact.

Baugerud and Melinder (2012) highlight the importance of planning and offering explanations to reduce stress and help children cope. They recommend that ‘practical guidelines, the timing of intervention, degree of caregiver involvement and therapeutic treatment should be standardised to facilitate decisions’ (p. 268). As the separation event represents a break in continuity between the past and present, children entering care need to be able to understand the reasons behind this so they can integrate their past experiences into a cohesive self-concept (Children’s Commissioner 2015). Ensuring children have as much information as possible to process, narrate, revise, and retell their personal stories at each stage can provide a foundation for the self-understanding that is needed to construct a sense of self that is both stable and adaptive (Welbourne 2012), potentially reducing the symptoms of trauma and PTSD (Peltonen and Kangaslampi 2019). The presence of empathetic listeners can support this process, as validation and shared understanding contribute to the recalling and internalization of life narratives (McAdams and McLean 2013). Furthermore, experiencing a reliable and emotionally attuned holding relationship may have therapeutic benefits (Ferguson et al. 2022), helping to mitigate the trauma of separation by fostering a sense of safety and emotional containment. In this context, the social worker acts as a ‘transitional participant’ ( Kanter 2004; cited in Ferguson 2011), whose role in the separation process is to participate by offering the child a sense of continuity and emotional stability amid the uncertainty and disruption that it triggers.

Trauma-informed care/practice

There has been growing interest in trauma-informed approaches within child and family social work (Cooper, Sadowski, and Townsend 2023). This is mainly driven by developments in practice and research in the USA, where Trauma Informed Care (TIC) initiatives have been developed in response to findings from seminal studies. These studies highlight the importance of addressing children’s trauma early on as a preventative measure to mitigate the psychological effects of adverse childhood experiences (Kerr-Davis et al. 2023; Spratt, Devaney, and Frederick 2019). In the UK context, the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities (OfHID 2022) published a set of principles based on a working definition of Trauma Informed Practice (TIP):

Trauma-informed practice is an approach to health and care interventions which is grounded in the understanding that trauma exposure can impact an individual’s neurological, biological, psychological, and social development (OfHID 2022).

Few studies examine TIP’s impact in the UK (Hickle 2020; Sweeney et al. 2016), but international studies show positive outcomes like improved mental and emotional health for children, reduced caregiver stress, increased placement stability (Bunting et al. 2019) and post-traumatic growth (Levenson 2017). Other studies report increased staff knowledge, confidence, and skills (Lang et al. 2016).

Hanson and Lang (2016) stress the importance of consistent implementation across agencies, noting that effective TIC relies on sustained training and organizational commitment. Researchers have highlighted the need for systemic support, workforce development, and rigorous evidence-based approaches, as well as a robust evaluation framework to harness this potential and ensure TIC interventions are tailored to diverse service settings (Mersky, Topitzes, and Britz 2019; Wathen, Schmitt, and MacGregor 2023). Underlying this methodological challenge is a deeper issue, namely the lack of consensus on what constitutes trauma itself.

What is trauma?

Trauma is considered a ‘hot topic’ in social work (Beddoe et al. 2019), but it has long been a central, unifying concept intersecting many areas of social work practice (Joseph and Murphy 2014). Yet, the concept remains poorly defined. Researchers debate its precise meaning with various disciplines offering a range of interpretations and conceptual frameworks. This has led to ongoing confusion and several conflicting, potentially counterproductive explanations of its meaning (Chatterjee and Park 2024; Krupnik 2019). Part of the problem is that the scope of definitions and the boundaries between common stressors and trauma are debated (Bulathwatta, Witruk, and Reschke 2016; Winders et al. 2020). Echoing these concerns, others argue that the lack of clarity in defining trauma calls into question the specificity of trauma-focused interventions, their aims and effects (Chatterjee and Park 2024; Krupnik 2019). The challenges of establishing a universally accepted definition of psychological trauma for specific social work settings have had consequences for research, practice, and policymaking. Isobel, Goodyear and Foster (2019) point to the tension between the need for a comprehensive definition that captures a variety of experiences and the risk of making the concept so broad it becomes meaningless.

In the UK context, the government defines trauma as

an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as harmful or life threatening. While unique to the individual, generally the experience of trauma can cause lasting adverse effects, limiting the ability to function and achieve mental, physical, social, emotional or spiritual well-being. (OfHID 2022)

This broad conceptualization highlights the pervasive and long-term impact trauma can have on an individual’s development and well-being. Reflecting this understanding, statutory safeguarding guidance emphasizes the need to consider the enduring effects of trauma when making decisions that promote the best interests of the child (HM Government 2023). The CCIOC practice guidance builds on this national framework by adopting a relational and developmental lens. Drawing on Beacon House’s perspective (Lyons et al. 2020), trauma is understood as the cumulative impact of early, repeated experiences of harm and loss within a child’s key relationships, typically occurring in early life. These experiences, such as abuse, neglect, and separation from primary caregivers, are particularly relevant for children entering the care system.

Method

To explore how this approach contributes to addressing trauma in the taking into care process, a qualitative study was conducted with participants in CCIOC meetings.

Key research questions included:

• What were the experiences of practitioners involved in CCIOC meetings?
• What were the participants’ views on the potential benefits, or otherwise, of using this approach?
• What were the strengths of this approach and how could it be improved?

Recruitment and sample

Purposive sampling was used to recruit practitioners involved in the CCIOC process. Chairs of CCIOC meetings identified eligible individuals, and researchers subsequently sent a recruitment email to those who expressed interest.

Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were completed with a range of professionals: social work practitioners, managers, foster carers, Independent Reviewing Officers, children’s guardians, health professionals and teachers.

A themed schedule was used to gather the participants’ perspectives on the potential impact of this approach and whether it contributed to improved outcomes for children. The aim was to understand their views on what worked, what could be changed, and the benefits or otherwise of this approach. Participants were encouraged to reflect on the impact of the CCIOC approach and how this compared to previous experiences of being involved in statutory child separations.

Ethics

Ethical approval for the study was obtained from Goldsmiths, University of London Research Ethics Sub-Committee (ref 1721).

The materials sent to prospective participants included an invitation to participate with an information sheet explaining the research rationale and the interview process. The document clarified that participation was voluntary; that information about participation in the study would not be shared with employers; that they could decline to answer any questions; and they had the right to withdraw at any stage without any consequences. The information pack provided assurances regarding confidentiality, anonymity, and the secure handling of their data.

Prospective participants were invited to contact the research team to ask questions about the research before agreeing to take part. Consent was obtained via an online form and confirmed verbally at the beginning of the interviews. Interviews were recorded using MS Teams and the recording was stored in an encrypted university OneDrive folder. Transcripts were checked and updated to ensure accuracy.

Data analysis

Our approach to thematic analysis (Braun et al. 2019) was highly collaborative (Cornish, Gillespie, and Zittoun 2014). Each interview transcript was shared and reviewed by a designated researcher. Relevant data were extracted and moved to a shared, interactive MS Word table with rows representing participants and columns corresponding to preliminary codes and topic areas agreed in advance. The initial coding framework was informed by the topic guide but was iteratively refined through further engagement with the data and collaborative discussions between researchers and a core group of practitioners. Themes were reviewed, refined, and evaluated regularly during meetings to ensure a consistency of approach. The research team collectively agreed on the final thematic framework, ensuring that each theme was clearly outlined and grounded in the data. Once the table was fully populated, the team met to synthesize the findings and agree on the central themes that best captured patterns across the dataset, forming the basis for the final analysis and reporting.

The collaboration between researchers and practitioners has remained central to each stage of the process, and this article was written in close consultation with the same practitioners who originated the idea to use trauma-informed principles to guide this area of practice.

Findings

The interviews revealed numerous, interlinked dimensions of CCIOC meetings, including the effect on the child/ren, families and carers; multi-agency working; and on practitioners themselves.

All the respondents were acutely aware that separating children from their families/carers was likely to be traumatic. They also reported feeling frustrated by the hurdles that made handling separations in a more child-centred way challenging. Chief amongst these hurdles were the pressures of planning in emergencies, the lack of professional guidance and the time constraints imposed by competing demands. Despite this, the CCIOC meetings were widely viewed as an opportunity to ‘stop and reflect’, to collectively engage with the impact of the intervention on the life of the child/ren and to co-produce a plan on how to best support them at the point of separation.

In the following subsections, we explore four key themes generated from the analysis of the data dealing with how professionals sought to respond to the traumatic effects of the separation on the child in question.

Theme 1: Holistic picture of the child

Practitioners reported that documents shared before a planned separation often lacked sufficient information for a coherent account of the child’s needs and situation. One of the clearest perceived benefits of the CCIOC meetings was that they brought together key people with knowledge of the child’s diverse needs, capacities, and circumstances (at school, home, etc.). Having access to this information was found to be extremely helpful to the planning process overall.

I think working in isolation, you get a single view of one person. It’s like you’re missing pieces of the puzzle. […] So it’s that collective working built a full picture of the true young person and enables all parties to kind of share their concerns, their comments, […] and enables us to work together to support each other. (Ava)

Having access to more pieces of the puzzle was viewed as essential to safeguard the child and prepare for their emotional responses to the coming into care process. It allowed all parties to approach the event of separation and placement with a more empathetic response than they would have been capable of otherwise. One foster carer highlighted this when outlining the advantages of being able to talk through how a child was likely to respond to their new foster carers with somebody who knew them well enough to predict their emotional responses.

It’s one thing reading on a report that a child can become physically and verbally abusive. It’s a very different thing to have a conversation with somebody where they say to you, ‘Just to put that into plain text […] Are you ready for that? […] our ability to empathise with that young person and their emotions I think was, was supercharged essentially by that meeting’. (Nathan)

The meeting offered an opportunity for direct communication to clarify details about the child’s behaviour and circumstances of separation, which improved practitioners’ ability to reassure the child, answer their questions, and plan in a child-centred way. One respondent perceived this as instrumental to the success of a placement.

That meeting […] was actually amazing because all of the questions that our foster carer had to ask, it wasn’t back and forth […] it happened there and then and all of the questions were answered. And still until today, that placement is still going ahead smoothly (Serena)

Coordinating these responses at multiple stages of the coming-into-care process was understood to be crucial to ensuring that the separation went as smoothly as possible, minimizing the interruption to the child’s life. CCIOC meetings were believed to contribute to this significantly. As one social worker put it, the meeting ensured that ‘everyone knew what was going on, what our next steps were and what each professional should be doing’. (Sienna)

Coming together around a shared aim made practitioners feel that they were part of a team with a ‘joint plan’, well-supported in their efforts to contain the child/ren’s anxiety during the separation process. They reported benefits including a clearer understanding of all aspects of the process and building trust in their partnerships with other practitioners. A social worker framed this in terms of inclusion:

They feel ‘I’m included.’ They feel consulted. They feel that the local authority is sharing information with them at a relevant time. […] they are more likely to then work with us and support our care plan, if we let them know what we’re doing before we actually do it. (Lucia)

Theme 2: Shared, consistent narrative

The importance of a joint approach was not only highlighted in terms of the process but also regarding a shared narrative as outlined in the literature review. The CCIOC meeting offered an opportunity to co-construct an age-appropriate narrative of why a child was being separated from their family. Respondents understood that the child’s feeling of uncertainty was amplified when they received different versions of events from different sources, contributing to their feelings of powerlessness. In line with CCIOC guidance, family members were included in the process wherever possible.

When you prepare a child and they kind of understand the reasons you’re making a decision about their life, that can really lessen the trauma. So, we did that, we also had discussions with the mum and just encouraged her as much as possible to support the child to understand the reasons we’re worried and thinking about them coming into care. (Zara)

Several of the respondents spoke about the need for younger children to be able to make sense of their experiences of going into care as they got older. Taking care of what was being communicated and written into their reports at the time of the separation was believed to be a helpful aid for children. Being able to record a shared narrative of this time was also perceived as supporting and containing young people who might otherwise have experienced gaps or inconsistencies in their memory, predisposing them to blame themselves for events that were outside of their control. As a social work manager detailed:

So that was some shared language between professionals and or with any family members […] So that it was really clear to children why this action was being taken again to kind of minimise any blame that children might place on themselves. (Hazel)

The meeting was viewed as helpful for organizing contact post-separation in a way that was less traumatic, that is, by giving the child certainty about when they would see their parent/s again after being placed and by planning contact in a way that considered the complex emotions that a child might feel towards their parent after a separation. One practitioner spoke about how the meeting had led her to consider how to give the child more agency and control over the process by allowing them to shape their own narrative:

I just took her through her journey. […] What do you think about this? What would be your, you know, choice if you had, you know, a magic wand that you could make a choice. So, and that really helped this young girl. (Lucia)

Theme 3: Transitional participants and objects

The CCIOC guidance acknowledges the importance of relationships in supporting children through the separation process as reflected in its core principles. CCIOC meetings explored how trusted individuals, such as parents, siblings, extended family members, or familiar professionals could contribute to facilitating the transition, offering relational continuity and emotional support.

Reflecting on previous experiences, one of the social workers shared that:

a lot of the times when I’ve done a removal, I’ve had to work hours and hours sitting, trying to contain the child because they’re crying, saying I want to go, or they don’t want me to go. (Zara)

This reflects the practitioner’s role in providing containment and continuity during a moment of acute distress. It suggests that the practitioner acted as a stabilizing figure, a transitional participant (Kanter 2004; cited in Ferguson 2011), emotionally holding the child. The quote illustrates that separations are emotionally charged events, requiring support from adults that can show empathy, patience, and resilience.

In another example, the school’s Safeguarding Lead was identified as a familiar and trusted figure, having known the child over a longer period. They accompanied the young person and the social worker to provide reassurance and emotional support.

As the participant explained:

my role actually became one of the […] members of staff in school who actually went with the young person and [the social worker] to their placement to make him feel at home, to make him feel comfortable that they had somebody from school going with them. (Asim)

Other examples that emerged from the CCIOC meetings of how respondents sought to involve trusted people to bridge the divide caused by the separation included recording voice notes from a child’s mother to provide them with some continuity of care, and sharing pictures of foster carers in advance to minimize the feeling of estrangement that children could experience when finding themselves in the care of people who were complete strangers to them.

Another way that respondents were able to support the child and ensure continuity as part of the CCIOC planning process was through the discussion of how transitional objects such as pictures, toys and other personal belongings, could be used. Whilst this was not specifically discussed in all the CCIOC meetings, the guidance encourages practitioners to consider the use of transitional objects and participants offered various examples of how they had been employed to help children cope with the emotional impact of separation from their families. As the quotes below show, these objects were believed to carry symbolic meaning, representing the child’s connection to loved ones. Practitioners viewed them as playing a considerable role in providing comfort, security, and continuity for children during a difficult transition, helping children to feel reassured and containing their emotions, as described by a social worker in the example below:

So, the child was crying, kicking, screaming, hitting his head, saying that he wasn’t coming with us. And the sister went upstairs and got a gold crucifix… and I think it was like, air pods, […] and immediately he calmed down, […] and on the journey to the placement, he was holding them, it was as though it was kind of containing his emotions. (Zara)

The foster carer also observed how the air pods came to symbolize a ‘forget me not’, something the child could hold on to for emotional comfort.

Those air pod pros were given to him by his sister, […] at a heightened state of emotion as he walked out the door, and it was almost like a forget me not […] And he literally slept with those air pod pros. (Nathan)

Sharing different strategies and insights in the meeting about potential sources of familiarity and comfort was seen as helpful for providing a sense of continuity, bridging the before and after of a child’s move into care. Items or experiences that were imbricated in the child’s everyday life were used to hold space for children, making the unfamiliar environment of a new home seem less strange. These could include loved items of clothing, toys, games, books that children might bring into care with them, or comfort foods as in this example:

He’s got a real love for bacon for example, so we were like ‘right well when he walked through the door what better smelled have wafting around the house than freshly cooked bacon’. (Nathan)

Foster carers were also encouraged to personalize the child’s room with favourite items and objects that reflected their interests. As this social worker put it:

If they see that actually, like I really like Spider Man, for example, and foster carers have gone out and made a Spider Man room or Spider Man bedding, I think automatically that just makes them feel welcomed and comfortable in that environment. (Zara)

This consideration for the child’s lived experience of the first hours and days following their move into care was seen as valuable for generating ideas about how to ease the stress of early interactions with children who were overwhelmed by what was happening to them.

Theme 4: Involvement of the child/ren

CCIOC meetings amplified children’s voices by involving them in the process, either in person or through written letters. This brought the child’s concerns to the forefront, prioritizing their wishes over practitioners’ anxieties about working under pressure. As one safeguarding lead outlined:

They definitely had loads of opportunity to talk and ask questions about you know what if this happens, loads of what ifs. And that was really good for them because I think it helped them feel at ease as well. (Asim)

Another social worker noted that while the potential for the experience to be traumatic could not be eliminated altogether, the meetings enabled those involved to work more closely together in their coordinated attempts to reduce the pain of separation.

It was still traumatic but sharing the information I think helps and everybody then working together. (Lucia)

In conclusion, keeping the child at the centre of the planning process was a key benefit of the CCIOC meetings. This shared approach allowed practitioners to coordinate effectively, not only among themselves but also with the young person, ensuring that the child’s voice was heard and their needs prioritized. While this study focused on the separation and the immediate transition period, practitioners suggested that this trauma-informed approach may contribute to longer-term benefits for children and families.

Discussion

As the findings suggest, a detailed planning process with concern for the child’s lived experience at its centre was believed to play a part in three important ways: (1) minimizing the traumatizing effects of the separation, (2) providing greater continuity in the transition to a foster placement, and (3) giving practitioners a sense of agency when dealing with a separation. Foster care placements were thought to be more likely to endure as a CCIOC meeting facilitated an exchange of information about the needs of each child that helped foster carers to anticipate how best to support them. Respondents also spoke about how the CCIOC meetings had enabled the professional network around the child to acknowledge the pain, confusion, and disruption from such a separation and to realistically assess what challenges each child was likely to face. Several practitioners spoke about how the meeting had helped both the child and the professionals involved to feel more ‘contained’ at different stages of the process. In this section, we take a closer look at the significance of these findings and consider to what extent the CCIOC meetings can be said to have contributed to ‘reducing’ the trauma of children going into care.

Some practitioners hoped that trauma-informed practices would reduce trauma and improve long-term outcomes. However, there were others whose practice-based understanding of how trauma works in this context led them to question the term ‘trauma reducing’ because it gave the false impression that it was possible to control all the psychological harm caused by separation from a family or caregiver. In other words, they assumed, based on their own experience, that some trauma was inevitable because such a seismic event in the life of the child was likely to be overwhelming and destabilizing, irrespective of what procedural or other steps were taken to lessen its impact. This did not prevent most respondents from believing there were steps they could take to make both—the event of separation itself and the period of transition that followed it—less traumatic overall. All agreed that the CCIOC approach could be instrumental in taking these steps.

Practitioners worried about the psychological and emotional harm that could be caused by taking a child into care. As practical questions about the logistics of an intervention tend to take priority, they often felt alone with their concerns. By focusing on naming potential trauma, CCIOC meetings allowed practitioners to consider in detail the impact on the child at each stage of the transition. For some, this was seen as a necessary precondition to being able to reflect on the steps they could take to ‘manage’ the child’s responses to trauma rather than to reduce or prevent it from happening altogether:

How do we put in strategies to help that young person manage the behaviour, the emotions and the behaviours that are gonna present with that trauma? (Ava).

In this respect, the findings underlined the need, highlighted by others (Chatterjee and Park 2024; Krupnik 2019), for a clearer shared understanding of trauma in a social work context that considers what the trauma concept is being used for. In recognition of this, we propose using the term, ‘trauma responsive’ in place of ‘trauma reducing’. To paraphrase a formulation of this from an interview: ‘it’s not necessarily that this thing is happening that is trauma, it’s how someone experiences the thing that is happening’ (Clara). This marks a shift in the language of safeguarding from focusing on what can be managed and reduced to focusing on what tangible steps can be taken to support the child to endure a painful experience. It also brings the concept of a trauma-informed approach for social work in line with existing understandings of how trauma works in the context of children being separated from their families (Bowlby 2010; English, Thompson, and White 2015; Melinder et al. 2013). These findings were consistent with current guidance on the need to support continuity for the child during their transition into care, both in terms of their routines and in terms of their past and future concepts of self and identity (Baugerud and Melinder 2012; Children’s Commissioner 2015; McAdams and McLean 2013; Welbourne 2012). The CCIOC meetings were used to strengthen continuity, and this included considering how transitional objects might be used to provide children with feelings of security, continuity, and belonging (Watson, Hahn, and Staines 2020).

Considering that this study took place in one of the most diverse regions of the UK, a finding from the interviews that we found particularly surprising was the lack of any explicit reference to how the experiences of children going into care were shaped by racialized or other forms of difference, such as disability. Understanding the reasons for this goes beyond the scope of the study but it points to the risk that by becoming overly focused on trauma-informed practices, the wider structural and institutional obstacles to protecting children from racially minoritized backgrounds or disabled children may be missed or minimized. This is particularly concerning given the socio-political context of the UK as a colonial power (Atwool 2019) and taking account of how decades of neoliberal social policy have minimized inequalities and social injustices linked to poverty and race (Kirton 2018).

Another of the more surprising findings from the interviews was the strong message that a trauma-responsive approach needs to consider the emotional and psychological effects of separation work on practitioners themselves and on the culture of child safeguarding more generally. Anxiety over the unintended consequences of a separation could be intense and ongoing. Some respondents described suffering from forms of ‘vicarious traumatisation’ due to finding themselves powerless to shield those in their care from the failings of a strained social care infrastructure (Anne Dombo and Whiting Blome 2016; Méndez-Fernández et al. 2022). One of the main ways that the CCIOC meeting was found to be helpful in addressing this was by protecting the time needed for the professional network to ‘slow down and reflect’ as one respondent put it. The importance of pushing back against a sped-up culture of reactive safeguarding, to enable trauma-responsive approaches has received little attention in recent years but was seen as necessary to allow a more careful and reflective mode of engagement, in which shared understandings could emerge. This helped to lessen the anxiety experienced by professionals but, in addition, it meant that they were able to establish a coherent narrative to share with children and families. Practitioners involved in this process described doing this with an attention to detail that they would not have been able to give to the situation if they had been working alone.

In summary, by dedicating time to a discussion about the child’s lived experience of a separation, practitioners felt able to be more involved and capable of responding to the most predictable stressors. This included the exchange of specific details about what each child was likely to find most painful or overwhelming about the transition based on the partial knowledge of them shared during the meeting. In this respect, these meetings allowed for a different mode of care, one embedded in the world of each child, and therefore more able to respond to the impact of the changes underway. To borrow one of Donna Haraway’s neologisms from Staying with the Trouble, they helped to create the conditions for cultivating a certain ‘response-ability’ (2016: 12) in relation to the possible long-term consequences of taking a child into care.

Strengths and limitations

This study helps fill the gap in knowledge about the approaches used to support children and young people during separations. It also adds to the evidence base on trauma-informed approaches in social work. It offers an in-depth exploration of participants’ perspectives on trauma-informed practice, contributing valuable knowledge to an under-researched area. The sample included participants from different disciplines. The use of interviews allowed for rich, detailed accounts that provide a nuanced understanding of how this process worked in practice. The study design and data analysis were based on close collaboration between academics and practitioners.

However, the study has a number of limitations. The sample is relatively small. The reliance on self-selected participants introduced a risk of bias. The study was undertaken in London and different results may emerge in other areas and organizational contexts. Additionally, the findings are based on reported benefits, and the study does not provide evidence on service user outcome. The voices of children and families are notably absent.

Future studies could aim to address these limitations by exploring the views and experience of a larger number of professionals, working across different geographical and cultural contexts, and include the voices of children and families. Additionally, future research could use other research methods. For example, observation could generate more evidence on actual rather than reported practice. Finally, future research could explore how trauma-informed practices at this early-stage influence longer-term outcomes for children in care.

Conclusion

This collaborative project aims to develop a compassionate approach to one of the most challenging aspects of social work, ensuring children receive the best care during their transition into the care system. This article explored the experiences and practices of twenty-one practitioners and carers following their participation in the CCIOC process. The results are promising and indicate significant benefits. This research makes the case that engaging with the lived experience of a child during their move into care is necessary as part of any planning process that claims to be trauma-informed or trauma responsive. Throughout the interviews, trauma emerged as something that practitioners needed to accept and work with, leading to a shift in the language we are using to describe the aim of the guidance, from ‘trauma reducing’ to ‘trauma responsive’. The CCIOC approach supported being ‘trauma responsive’ through four strategies: (1) sharing and discussing information that allowed a fuller picture of the child, (2) creating cohesive, co-produced narratives to be shared with the child, (3) using strategies that combined transitional objects with the presence of familiar, trusted adults to provide comfort and support continuity in moments of rupture, and (4) involving the child in the process.

Many of the interviewees reported psychological and logistical barriers to balancing the work of planning (often with little time and scarce resources), with the receptive state of mind needed to attend to the painful realities of the separation of a child from their family. Incorporating CCIOC principles arguably requires a higher level of commitment from all those involved at a time when the pressures on children’s services are high. Paradoxically, we found that by prioritizing the lived experience of the child, practitioners were able to diffuse some of that pressure, helping each other to focus on the small steps and contributions they could make, suggesting that CCIOC meetings were perceived as an investment and could prove beneficial for children as well as practitioners. Some of them noted that, the CCIOC meeting had a different tone to other multi-agency meetings, and that the focus on the inner life of the child/ren involved had made it feel different. This led one practitioner to comment that ‘when you think about it […] that is exactly how all other meetings should be’ (Asim).

We see the value of this approach in its ethos—the call to ‘stay with’ the potential for trauma as opposed to avoiding it, by creating time and space for difficult feelings. To reduce avoidant, process-led practices and instead support more relational and responsive practices, we recommend other organizations should consider adopting this approach as it could help to maintain a child-focused, trauma-responsive practice. Rather than be prescriptive, we suggest other organizations may want to test the approach or consider how to create spaces for professionals to reflect on the child’s lived experience of separation, including the parts that practitioners may understandably wish to avoid discussing because of their real or perceived lack of control over the situation. We acknowledge that implementing this framework will be highly context specific as the working culture, time of separation, availability of practitioners etc., all play a role.

Implementing a new approach needs to be supported by resources, such as training for the multi-agency network. Future research could explore the perspectives of children and young people, as well as their carers to add a nuanced understanding of circumstances and their impact, centring child/ren as heterogeneous group.

Facing trauma can be achieved only with the collaboration of multiple stakeholders, instead of only inviting voices of ‘academic experts’— bringing together researchers, practitioners and carers has been found invaluable to the success of this project. The CCIOC framework is embedded in the practice of this local authority and work continues to ensure that more social workers use this framework when a child or children must be separated from their families.