Maintaining Relationships: From Permission to Practice in Moray

This learning story draws on a conversation with:

• Georgina Sutherland, Improvement Officer (Corporate Parenting), Children’s Services Planning, Moray
• Pamela Davidson, Senior Residential Child Care Worker.

It explores what they learned while helping people maintain the relationships that matter.

The work was a collaboration between Moray Council and Cala Children’s Home.

What were you trying to understand?

Moray wanted to understand how to continue important relationships when young people moved on from care. They also wanted to explore why these relationships often ended, even when they mattered deeply to both young people and practitioners.

Young people spoke about the disappointment they felt when trusted relationships seemed to end at a time of transition. Practitioners also described uncertainty about professional boundaries, regulation, social media, sharing contact details and personal risk.

This created a “grey area” where fear of getting something wrong could overshadow the risk of a young person leaving care without anyone they trusted.

As Georgina Sutherland explained, the work began to reframe the central question: “What’s the impact if a young person leaves care and has nobody, no relationships at all and everybody vanishes?”

The opportunity was not simply to produce guidance. It was to understand what would help important relationships continue safely, fairly and realistically in everyday practice.

What did you do?

The work began with conversations with care experienced young people who had moved on from residential care. The team also spoke with residential staff, social work teams, and throughcare and aftercare practitioners. Bringing these views together helped Moray understand what young people wanted, what practitioners were worried about and what support organisations needed to provide.

Funding supported an improvement officer and extra engagement capacity for a project lasting around 18 months. Young people, the Champions Board, practitioners, managers and corporate parenting partners all helped develop guidance on maintaining relationships.

Each service then adapted the guidance to its own context. At Cala Children’s Home, staffing arrangements were changed so practitioners could maintain relationships during paid work time. Maintaining relationships was also included in supervision, giving staff space to discuss concerns, emotional impact and practical decisions. The approach began to spread through partnerships with education, housing, police, and throughcare and aftercare teams.

What did you learn?

The clearest learning was that trusted relationships can support both young people and the people who care for them. They can help young people ask for support earlier, share concerns and stay connected to adults who know them well.

A review of ten young people found they were not reaching crisis point, because they had someone trusted to contact. Georgina said:

They weren’t reaching that crisis point because they had somebody to reach out to. They felt supported, they knew who to turn to, they knew that trusted adult was their person that would pick up the phone to them.

Pamela Davidson described how continuing relationships created an extra layer of safeguarding. In one example, a young person told trusted former carers about an abusive relationship when she had not spoken to anyone else. Pamela reflected:

We are able to see when our young people are really starting to take a dip.

The work also challenged the idea that maintaining contact always creates more risk. Pamela explained:

It actually adds an element of safeguarding for our young people as they move on.

The team learned to ask what might happen if the relationship didn’t continue.

For the workforce, the biggest change was having clear organisational support. Pamela summed it up:

It’s moved from being allowed, to being supported. That made a huge difference.

Practitioners were no longer expected to maintain relationships quietly, in their own time or without somewhere to take their concerns.

The team also learned that one approach will not suit every service. Residential care, social work, education, housing, policing and other services face different pressures, permissions and staffing arrangements. The guidance worked best when each team could ask, “What does this look like for us?” and develop a process that fitted its setting.

What helped?

What helped:

• Young people’s voices: Their experiences clearly showed the harm that can be caused when important relationships end suddenly.
• Senior leadership: Including the work in strategic plans and gaining support from corporate parenting leaders gave practitioners confidence and helped the approach spread beyond small pockets of practice.
• Protected work time: At Cala Children’s Home extra staffing enabled practitioners to maintain relationships during working hours.
• Reflective supervision: Staff had a recognised place to talk about the emotional weight they carried. Pamela explained: “You actually hold a lot. You hold a lot for a young person emotionally.”
• Cross-sector champions: Leaders in housing, education and policing helped make the guidance relevant to their own workforce and gave it credibility.
• Persistence: Partners needed time to ask questions, express concerns and reconsider their position. Listening to sceptical voices revealed barriers that early supporters might not have noticed.

What got in the way?

Fear, limited capacity and a lack of resources were recurring barriers. Practitioners worried about professional registration, boundaries, letting a young person down or being unavailable when needed. Georgina reflected: “I think it’s time and I think it’s resource… People are giving everything to their day-to-day job as it is.”

Recruitment pressures and different ways of working made consistent implementation difficult. Some teams found it easier than others to release staff, especially when support was needed unexpectedly. Practical costs also became an issue: travel, a coffee or a meal can become a barrier when staff have to pay themselves.

With hindsight, the team would involve regulatory bodies earlier, explore the barriers facing each service sooner and plan more clearly for practical costs and changing workforce pressures. with an acknowledgment that by building in flexibility it is easier to adapt to new/emerging pressures).

What difference did it make?

For young people, continuing relationships provided both emotional and practical support. This included help with appointments, housing and household tasks; having somewhere familiar to return at Christmas; and knowing trusted adults would respond when life became difficult. In some circumstances, young people could briefly return to a residential setting for safety, care and breathing space.

The strongest signs of preventative impact came from stories of young people asking for help before or during a difficult period. Trusted relationships supported earlier help, reduced isolation and sometimes stopped situations from escalating. Georgina described older young people avoiding crisis because they knew someone trusted would answer.

For practitioners, protected time made maintaining relationships possible for more people. Pamela explained that contact outside work had previously only been realistic for some staff:

For those that have got families at home, have got other responsibilities, it was really almost impossible. So I think we’ve widened it. We’ve taken away that barrier.

Support during work time and space in supervision also meant that practitioners did not have to carry responsibility alone. Pamela described the value of discussing difficult situations: “You can take it and share it, so you’re not just left holding it on your own.”

Bringing together young people’s experiences, workforce feedback and observations from services created a richer picture. Young people showed why continuity mattered. Practitioners identified what was needed to make it sustainable. Local examples showed how trusted relationships could help prevent crisis. Relying on only one type of evidence would have missed important parts of the story.

Why does this matter?

The work helped shift local thinking. Relationships were no longer seen as an optional extra, but as an important part of safeguarding, wellbeing and crisis prevention. It highlighted the risks of relationships ending suddenly and showed that supporting practitioners is closely linked to supporting young people.

The learning informed children’s services planning, corporate parenting work, local processes and supervision. It also began to influence education, housing and policing, showing that important relationships are not the responsibility of social work or residential care alone.

Moray’s experience shows that relationship-based practice becomes sustainable when values are backed by everyday decisions about staffing, working hours, supervision, commissioning, budgets, policies and leadership.

What could other local areas learn?

Other areas could test this approach with one service or a small number of relationships. Practical learning includes:

• Listen to young people, care experienced adults, practitioners and managers—both separately and together.
• Reframe risk. Ask what could happen if an important relationship ends, as well as what could happen if it continues.
• Secure visible support from senior leaders while keeping ownership with the people closest to the work.
• Go beyond permission by providing paid time, staff cover, supervision and practical resources.
• Involve regulatory partners, and even individuals who may be sceptical, early in the process. Their concerns can reveal genuine barriers to implementation.
• Let each service turn shared principles into a process that works in its own setting.
• Plan for both arranged contact and unexpected calls for help.
• Consider costs such as travel, food and digital access so staff and young people are not excluded.
• Capture stories of prevention, including situations that did not escalate, alongside evidence about workforce confidence and experience.
• Expect culture change to take time and review the guidance as staffing and external pressures change.

A useful first step would be to identify one trusted relationship at risk of ending and agree with both people whether it should continue. The service could then provide a named manager, protected time, supervision and a simple review point. The review should consider not only whether contact happened, but whether the young person felt more connected and able to ask for help, and whether the practitioner felt supported rather than solely responsible.