If relationships matter so much, why don't we focus on them more?

After more than 30 years as a social worker, working with care experienced children and young people across local authorities and the third sector, one question has stayed with me throughout my career:

If we know relationships are so important, why don't we focus on them more?

Time and again, I saw decisions about children's care dominated by practical considerations such as placement availability, resources and costs. Of course, these things matter. But what receives less attention was the quality of the relationships children were building with the people caring for them.

Throughout my career in both local authority and third sector management, I wanted children to be with families who had the capacity to understand their needs, build strong and healthy relationships, and have access to the support they needed when challenges arose. I knew how important those relationships were, particularly for children who had already experienced significant trauma and loss. But it appeared to me that the system struggled to give this area the attention and focus needed.

The answer came unexpectedly when Adoptionplus were approached by a number of Local Authorities asking us to help them improve their therapeutic support for care experienced children. It made me realise something important: if we want to improve outcomes, we need a way to measure what matters.

In large organisations, what gets measured often becomes the focus. In my experience, we were good at measuring costs, timescales and performance targets. What we weren't measuring consistently was something much more fundamental:

Are we helping this young person build a stronger, safer relationship with their carers?

Healthy, trusting relationships between children and their careers are at the heart of supporting their emotional health and wellbeing. These relationships help children develop trust, confidence, emotional regulation, empathy, responsibility, resilience, independence, and a secure sense of self, all of which support their well-being throughout life.

While building these relationships can often be challenging, particularly when a young person struggles to trust adults and pushes them away, they are essential for healing and recovery. Through safe, consistent, and nurturing relationships, young people can begin to develop trust, strengthen their emotional wellbeing, and build a more positive sense of themselves and others. The quality of the relationships we offer can have a significant impact, providing experiences that help them feel valued, understood, and supported, even when forming those connections takes time, patience, and persistence.

This creates a real challenge. We know that secure relationships with foster carers can be transformational. Yet many traumatised children can find those very relationships difficult and even frightening

So how do we know what helps? Which approaches genuinely strengthen these relationships?  What interventions make a difference? Where we should focus our time, energy and resources? Ultimately, how we can measures these things?

To help us answer this question, we brought together childcare managers and clinicians from five local authorities. Along with our clinical team we considered which measures they found most useful when supporting care experienced children and their carers.

The response was unanimous.

They identified a measure called Thinking About Your Child (TAYC), developed by clinical psychologist Dr Kim Golding, as having significant potential. However, there was a problem. The measure had not been formally validated, different practitioners were interpreting and scoring it in different ways, and it took time to analysis, that many social workers didn’t always have.

If it was going to be truly useful, it needed to be reliable and it needed to be easy.

We commissioned the Rees Centre at Oxford University to test and validate the measure. Their work helped strengthen its reliability and led to important improvements. The result was Thinking About Your Child – Revised (TAYC-R).

But we didn't stop there.

Having spent decades in frontline practice, I knew that even the best tool would only be effective if it was easy to use. Social workers, foster carers and clinicians are already under enormous time pressures.

So we digitised the measure. Now, with a simple and quick email invitation, carers can complete the assessment, and the agency instantly receive scored results, analysis, and a clear, jargon-free report. This makes the tool far more accessible and easier to use in everyday practice, reducing administration time while providing meaningful insights that can directly inform support planning.

We have recently added tracking functionality, enabling social workers and managers to monitor progress over time and evaluate the impact of different interventions, support strategies, and training programmes. Rather than relying on anecdotal evidence alone, practitioners can see measurable changes across four key dimensions that are fundamental to positive outcomes for children and young people. These dimensions are:

1. Changes in the carers skills and understanding of the young person’s emotional needs
2. The quality of the relationship between the carer and the young person
3. The young persons responsiveness to care and support being offered
4. Family stability

By providing a structured way to measure and track relationships, TAYC-R helps agencies identify strengths, target support more effectively, evidence the impact of their work, and ultimately improve the stability and quality of the care experienced by children and young people.

What has happened since has exceeded our expectations.

The digital TAYC-R is now one of only five measures recommended by the Department for Education for accessing the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund. Its currently being used for thousands of care experienced young people in England. We've also had interest from organisations in the United States and New Zealand.

But for me, the mission hasn't changed.

I've never been interested in creating a measure for the sake of creating a measure. The goal has always been much simpler than that.

I want us to focus more intentionally on the relationships that sit at the heart of children's lives.

Not every fostering service works therapeutically. But for those that do, and for those who recognise the life-changing impact that strong, secure relationships can have, TAYC-R offers a practical way to understand, support and strengthen those connections.

Because when relationships improve, children's lives improve too.

Adoptionplus