For too long, statutory social work has been dominated by crisis-led interventions, procedural compliance, and performance metrics that prioritise timeliness over lived safety. Families are frequently retraumatised by duplication, surveillance, and escalation, while practitioners experience moral distress when their professional values are misaligned with systemic imperatives.

TRB exists to close this gap. We are driving a national shift from a crisis-intervention model to a trauma-informed practice model, one that honours the Children Act 1989 welfare principles, aligns with the Families First Partnership, and ensures that children are supported to grow up safely within their families wherever possible.

Our Approach

Legislative Reform: Advocating for amendments to child law and statutory guidance, introducing stronger duties on courts and local authorities to evidence proportionality, consider parental needs, and exhaust stabilisation options before seeking removal.

Standards and Governance: Reframing ethics and professional standards so that trauma awareness becomes a measurable requirement of practice, not an optional value.

Trauma-Informed Assessment: Updating the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families to include structured trauma screening, dimensional formulations, and clear referral pathways to trauma specialists.

Auditable Tools: Developing practical instruments — such as the Delay-is-Harm Index and Trauma-Concordance Audits — that enable local authorities, inspectors, and practitioners to measure both effectiveness and harm reduction.

Accountability and Oversight: Embedding trauma-informed performance metrics into inspection and QA dashboards, ensuring agencies cannot “pass” on procedural grounds while causing secondary harm.

Why It Matters

Trauma is not a marginal issue — it is the underlying driver of much of what social care seeks to address: neglect, family breakdown, youth offending, and intergenerational cycles of harm. Without trauma regulation, the system optimises for procedural safety at the expense of real safety. With trauma regulation, children and families can be supported through stabilisation, least-intrusive alternatives, and recovery pathways that are both ethically sound and legally defensible.

The TRB is building the infrastructure for this transformation — aligning practice with the best of child law, international human rights, and trauma science. Our goal is nothing less than to reshape the foundations of children’s social work, protecting the public by ensuring services deliver safety that is lived, not just recorded.