This article, and others that follow, starts from a systemic premise that if we want to understand a young person’s experience of residential care, we cannot only look at the young person. We must look at the system, and systems around them.
When we work with children who are looked after, it can be very easy to locate our attention within the young person themselves: their history, their behaviour, their trauma, their needs and the complexities we are trying to help them make sense of.
And of course, understanding the individual child matters.
But systemic thinking asks us to widen the lens.
Widening the lens
A child living in residential care exists within an extraordinary network of relationships and systems: residential staff, managers, leadership, social workers, family, education, therapists and other professionals. Then there are the less obvious systems, rotas, handovers, recording, communication, policies, supervision, team relationships and organisational culture, to name just a few.
Within each of those spaces, different understandings of the same young person can develop. A young person can be understood through their risks in one space, their behaviour in another, their trauma somewhere else and their strengths and aspirations in another. Each may contain something important, but none represents the whole child.
Systemically, I think there is something important about being curious about how these understandings develop, which ones become dominant, how they travel around the systems and, importantly, how they influence the way adults subsequently respond to the young person.
Because young people may never attend a management meeting, read a policy or know how a staff rota is organised, but they can experience the consequences of all of them.
So, how can systemic thinking help?
With these various intersections in mind, systemic thinking reminds us to remain curious about the parts of a child’s life that exist outside of our immediate remit.
An RSW may come into the home with practical tasks and responsibilities to complete, bounded by the home’s policies, procedures and regulatory requirements, another system in itself that we could spend an entire article exploring. These structures matter. They are intended, ultimately, to support safe and consistent care.
But systemic thinking asks us to hold something else in mind too.
Imagine a young person returning to the home following an appointment with a CAMHS clinician. What version of themselves existed within that room? What was spoken about? What feelings, memories or understandings of themselves might have been brought to the surface? And what happens to all of that when they walk back through the door of the home?
They do not necessarily leave that experience behind.
Yet within minutes they may be entering another system, with different relationships, expectations, routines and boundaries. The RSW receiving them may see withdrawal, agitation, heightened energy or what might ordinarily be described as ‘challenging behaviour’. But what changes if, alongside responding to what we see, we remain curious about what the young person may be carrying from one part of their system into another?
This is where systemic thinking can widen our understanding. Rather than seeing each interaction or presentation in isolation, it asks us to consider the connections between them: what came before, what is happening now, what meaning the young person may be making of it and how our own system is responding in return.
It may mean offering support differently. At other times, it may require us to look at our own practice, routines, policies or procedures and ask whether they leave enough room for the complexity of the young person moving between these different worlds.
Moving between systems in a single day
And perhaps this becomes even more important when we consider how many of these transitions a young person may make in an ordinary day. We often think about transitions in residential care as the bigger moments, entering a placement, changing school or eventually leaving care. But young people may move between several different systems in a single day: home, school, family, social care, CAMHS and back home again.
Each system comes with different relationships, expectations, language, boundaries and perhaps even a different understanding of who that young person is. Yet the young person does not become a new person each time they cross from one into another. They carry themselves, and potentially something of each experience, with them.
Systemic thinking invites us to pay attention to these movements and the connections between them. What might a young person be carrying back into the home? What might they carry from the home into school, family time or therapy? And how might one part of the system be responding to something that has happened in another without even knowing it?
Interrupting our certainty
This kind of curiosity does not mean that residential staff need to know everything that happens within every other part of a young person’s life. Nor does it remove boundaries, responsibilities or the need to respond to risk and behaviour. What it can do is interrupt our certainty.
Instead of only asking, “Why is she behaving like this?”, we might also ask:
- What might have happened before this?
- Where has she just come from?
- What might she be carrying?
- What are we bringing to this interaction?
- Is something within our own system contributing to what we are seeing?
Those questions may change the response. They may influence a handover, a conversation between staff, how an incident is understood, what is taken to supervision, or even whether a routine, policy or way of working needs to be reconsidered. And ultimately, those seemingly organisational decisions can change what the young person experiences from the adults caring for them.
Because perhaps the task is not to decide which version is the ‘real’ young person. It is to make enough room for the whole young person to exist.