What is Relational Practice?
Relational Practice places relationships at the centre of how support is designed and delivered for children, young people and families.
Relational practice focuses on supporting strong, safe and trusting relationships between children and the adults around them. Practitioners need to develop respectful, empowering relationships with children, parents and carers to enable children and families to achieve their goals. The rise of bureaucratic, managerial systems poses a fundamental threat to this cornerstone of social work.
Relational practice is grounded in partnership. It values lived experience, cultural connection and collaboration between families, practitioners and communities.
Why Relational Practice Matters
Across NSW, children and families are increasingly navigating complex social, economic and intergenerational challenges. Evidence and practice experience consistently show that sustainable change happens when support is relational, consistent and trauma informed.
Relational approaches help to:
- Build trust between families and services
- Support earlier engagement before crises escalate
- Strengthen family capability and resilience
- Reduce system involvement and placement instability
- Improve long term safety and wellbeing outcomes for children
When relationships are prioritised, families are more likely to remain safely together, maintain connection to culture and community, and access support earlier.
Building Understanding of Relational Practice
ACWA is working in partnership with the Centre for Relational Care to strengthen understanding and application of relational care across the out of home care system in NSW.
This collaboration brings together sector expertise, practitioner experience and lived insight to better understand what enables strong, relationship based practice and what systemic barriers can limit it. As outlined in the Relational Care in Out of Home Care in NSW snapshot report, the work draws directly on feedback from more than 200 practitioners and managers across non government organisations, alongside sector discussions and leadership roundtables.
The partnership recognises that relational care is not simply an individual practice skill. While practitioners consistently value trust, empathy, collaboration and genuine partnership with children and families, system settings often prioritise compliance, speed and documentation over time, presence and connection. Strengthening relational care therefore requires change at workforce, organisational and system levels.
Through this joint work, ACWA and the Centre for Relational Care are supporting sector wide reflection, shared learning and practical action to help embed relational approaches across services. This includes:
- Increase understanding of the extent to which OOHC practitioners in NSW are
- Engaging in relational practice and identify enablers and barriers.
- Develop/build on and test strategies to address the barriers to relational practice,
- such as:
- Reducing administrative tasks so that practitioners can spend more time with
- children, parents and carers
- Reframing our language to be more engaging and less stigmatising for
- children and families
- Exploring how best to support newer practitioners in developing confidence
- and skills in relationship-building.
- Support government OOHC reforms and sector improvements.
A cross sector working group of non government providers, government representatives and people with lived experience is now progressing next steps, drawing on the report findings to develop practical initiatives that support practitioners to prioritise relationships with children, families and carers.
Project Overview
