THRIVING TOGETHER
Helping children in care Heal, Belong and Thrive
Thriving Together is ATA’s systemic, values-led approach to helping children and young people heal, belong and flourish within safe, connected and enduring networks of care.
It helps child welfare organisations ensure that the right children enter care at the right time, into environments with the relationships, understanding and support they need not simply to be safe, but to heal and thrive.
Healing is not just the absence of danger. It is the presence of safety, trust and attuned relationships that help the body, mind and spirit to recover.
WHY WAS THRIVING TOGETHER DEVELOPED?
Thriving Together grew from our experience of working alongside children, families, carers, practitioners and leaders across child welfare systems.
We saw committed professionals working hard to protect children from abuse and neglect. When children were experiencing significant harm, entering care could understandably be seen as the point at which safety would be achieved.
For some children, care is necessary and can be life-changing.
But care does not automatically resolve the experiences that brought a child there.
Children may enter care carrying the impact of trauma, loss, disrupted relationships, adversity and uncertainty. Some have significant emotional, relational and developmental needs that require skilled, consistent and well-supported care.
A placement can appear settled without a child having healed.
As children grow and develop, earlier experiences can continue to shape how they understand themselves, relationships and the world around them. At times these needs become more visible and place increasing demands on the relationships around the child.
When carers and professionals do not have the understanding, capacity or support they need at the point they need it, placements can become increasingly fragile.
Placement disruption brings further separation and loss. With each move, a child may experience another relationship ending, another change of home and another challenge to their sense of belonging.
This can create a cycle in which needs increase while the range of available care options becomes narrower.
This led us to ask a different question:
If care is necessary, how do we make sure care itself becomes part of the solution?
That question became the foundation of Thriving Together.
Thriving Together sits within Safeguarding Together, extending its network-centred, strengths and relationship-based principles into care and beyond.
Our starting point is that children should remain safely within their families and networks wherever possible.
When care is being considered, the decision cannot focus only on the risks of a child remaining at home.
Care does not eliminate risk.
Good decision-making also considers the potential risks and benefits of the actual care option available to that particular child.
This means thinking carefully about what separation may mean for the child, what they will need from their new care environment and whether the relationships, capacity and support around that placement are able to meet those needs.
The question becomes not simply:
Does this child need care?
But also:
What will this child need from care for it to genuinely improve their life?
Three connected areas
of healing
Thriving Together recognises that recovery from trauma is not achieved simply through removing a child from danger.
Three connected areas of healing guide the work.
Safety and Stabilisation
Children need to experience safety in everyday life.
Predictability, routines, emotional stability, trusted relationships and support to manage overwhelming feelings help create the foundations from which recovery becomes possible.
Trauma Processing
When children are ready, they may need appropriately paced support to understand, explore and integrate what they have lived through.
This cannot be rushed.
Trauma processing depends upon readiness, relational safety and sufficient stability around the child.
Reintegration and Growth
Healing also means looking forward.
Children need opportunities to develop a positive identity, growing autonomy, aspirations, skills, interests, meaningful community connections and hope for their future.
These areas are connected rather than fixed stages.
Children may move between them as their needs, relationships and circumstances change.
SAFE AND ATTUNED RELATIONSHIPS
At the heart of Thriving Together is the relationship between the child and the adults around them.
Children who have experienced trauma, loss or disrupted relationships need adults who can remain curious about what behaviour may be communicating, notice and respond to emotional needs and remain dependable when things become difficult.
Attuned caregiving is therefore central to Thriving Together.
But carers cannot be expected to do this alone.
They need the understanding, practical help, professional support
and wider network around them to sustain relationships through challenge and change.
Supporting the child means supporting the people who care for them.
CONNECTION, BELONGING
AND ENDURING NETWORKS
Thriving Together is deliberately network-centred, not service-centred.
Children need more than a succession of professionals, placements and plans. They need people who know them, care about them and remain connected to them over time.
Entering care should not mean leaving family, identity and belonging behind. Thriving Together maintains a strong focus on parents, siblings, kin, culture, community and the other important people in a child's life, while also recognising the new relationships that can become significant through care.
The work is therefore not only about identifying a placement. It is about building and strengthening a network around the child that can share responsibility, support relationships and remain alongside them wherever their pathway leads.
Where safe and possible, carers help children maintain and strengthen family relationships rather than replacing them. Reunification continues to be actively explored where it can safely be achieved.
Where children cannot return home, the goal remains bigger than achieving placement stability. It is to ensure that each child has a network of meaningful relationships and connections that can endure beyond individual placements, services and professional involvement.
Services may end. Professionals will change. The child's network needs to endure.
Thriving Together is deliberately network-centred, not service-centred.
Children need more than a succession of professionals, placements and plans. They need people who know them, care about them and remain connected to them over time.
Children need more than a succession of professionals, placements and plans. They need people who know them, care about them and remain connected to them over time.
Entering care should not mean leaving family, identity and belonging behind. Thriving Together maintains a strong focus on parents, siblings, kin, culture, community and the other important people in a child's life, while also recognising the new relationships that can become significant through care.
The work is therefore not only about identifying a placement. It is about building and strengthening a network around the child that can share responsibility, support relationships and remain alongside them wherever their pathway leads.
Where safe and possible, carers help children maintain and strengthen family relationships rather than replacing them. Reunification continues to be actively explored where it can safely be achieved.
Where children cannot return home, the goal remains bigger than achieving placement stability. It is to ensure that each child has a network of meaningful relationships and connections that can endure beyond individual placements, services and professional involvement.
Services may end. Professionals will change. The child's network needs to endure.
THE CHILD'S EXPERIENCE AT THE CENTRE
Children and young people are not passive recipients of care.
Their experiences, views, choices and goals help shape decisions about their lives.
Thriving Together strengthens meaningful participation throughout assessment, planning and review so that children's voices influence what happens around them rather than simply being recorded within professional processes.
Listening does not mean that everything a child wants will always be possible.
It means ensuring that children are heard, taken seriously and helped to understand the decisions that affect their lives.
DEVELOPING CONNECTED PATHWAYS
Thriving Together supports organisations to strengthen the journey into, through and beyond care.
Entry to Care
Decision-making considers both the risks of remaining at home and the risks and potential benefits associated with the actual care option available.
Recruitment and Preparation
Carers need more than willingness to care.
Thriving Together considers the knowledge, experience, relational capacity and support carers need to respond to the children they are being asked to care for and to sustain important family relationships.
Matching
Matching should be based on the needs of the individual child, not availability alone.
Children and carers need sufficient understanding and support to make informed and realistic decisions about whether a particular care arrangement can succeed.
Thrive Planning
Thriving Together is network-centred rather than plan-centred.
The child or young person, carers, parents, siblings, kin, trusted adults and professionals come together around a shared understanding of what the child needs and what each person will do to help make that happen.
Thrive Planning also looks ahead from the beginning. Whether the pathway is reunification, another form of permanency or eventually leaving care, the aim is to prevent drift and delay while intentionally strengthening the relationships and connections that can remain in the child’s life long after formal services have ended.
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Thriving Together connects assessment, planning, everyday care and review rather than treating them as separate professional processes.
Assessment develops a shared understanding of the child’s experiences, relationships, strengths and needs.
Planning brings the network together around meaningful Thrive Goals and practical arrangements for achieving them.
Everyday care is where those intentions become the child’s lived experience.
Review tests whether the child is actually experiencing the safety, relationships, healing, belonging and opportunities that were intended, and what the network needs to sustain, change or strengthen.
Plans are therefore living and responsive. They are tested in real life and refined as circumstances change.
The measure of success is not whether a plan has been completed, but whether the child has a strong enough network around them to help them heal, grow and thrive.
OUR VISION
Our vision is to set each young person on a pathway to thrive with support to heal from what they have lived through, a strong sense of identity, lifelong connections and a deep, enduring sense of belonging.
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