Trauma-informed practice provides the tools and skills to recognise and respond to trauma in the lives of children, families and communities. It enables ways of working to ensure people feel heard, valued and understood.

Rochdale Borough has recently made the commitment to become a trauma-informed borough, transforming the ways in which services and organisations work with children, families and local communities. 

During 2023, colleagues from across the system in Rochdale borough worked with the Innovation Unit to draw on their expertise in place-based systems transformation to support the Children and Young People’s Partnership in embedding trauma-informed practice across children’s and families services, alongside colleagues from across the system with a view to scaling it. 

Across the borough, we are working on a shared roadmap and resources to support each part of the system to develop its practice and approach. 

What Do We Mean By A Trauma-Informed System?

A trauma-informed system recognises the impact of effective trauma-informed care in providing support to people by including everyone who comes into contact with people: children, families and communities across the borough. This involves working at a system level to prevent trauma where possible and to break cycles of intergenerational trauma. A trauma-informed system supports individuals, teams and organisations to use practice consistently, collaboratively and creatively. It recognises and mitigates the impact of secondary trauma on staff (i.e. the emotional stress caused by hearing or witnessing someone else’s traumatic experiences), and looks for opportunities to reduce or remove re-traumatisation by the system itself.

Adopting a systems approach can feel overwhelming to begin with. Turning our attention to and learning from local services and organisations already working in a person-centred way can be a great first step. Our list of top tips for implementing change aims to help services and organisations in their early thinking.

Top Tips For Implementing Change

• Identifying your system’s bright spots: There is a vast number of individual practitioners, services and organisations already demonstrating effective trauma-informed practice. Taking an asset-based approach allows you to highlight and build on what is working. This might include health services delivering trauma-informed assessments in a safe environment; a VCSE organisation focusing on long-term, trusted practitioner relationships; a school’s innovative inclusion policy; or the police’s approach to supporting frontline staff facing secondary trauma. A strong understanding of local best practices provides a system with clear starting points for change and a network of local allies.

• Developing what good looks like across the system: For trauma-informed support to be effective it needs to be grounded in the lived experience of communities and those we are working with. Rochdale’s approach is based on a process of deep listening to children and families and on the input from practitioners at the frontline of this work. Their reflections were vital in developing a deeper understanding of trauma and its impact on people’s life trajectories as well as the life-changing effects of person-centred, trauma-informed care. Learning from the deep listening process provided some clear guidelines for the different features of trauma-informed practice, including for example practitioner relationships, safe environments, organisational leadership and multi-agency collaboration. These best practice guidelines formed the basis of Rochdale’s theory of change and impact framework, providing teams and organisations with helpful indicators for effective support.

• Mobilising champions across the system: Creating a trauma-informed system is a significant undertaking and it requires the passion and commitment of people who believe in the transformative impact of this work. Identifying and mobilising a group of leading trauma-informed champions across different sectors is central to gaining momentum and embedding shared ways of working. Senior leaders need to support animated practitioners to embed the practice in their own organisations as well as give them permission to collaborate as sector champions to develop joint approaches across the system. This approach recognises the importance of a single vision and approach for the whole system, while also allowing each sector to explore what being more trauma-informed means to them.

• Developing skills and opportunities for collective learning: Skilled people with a deep understanding of effective practice are at the heart of a trauma-informed system. Harnessing opportunities for collective, cross-sector learning is therefore vital for a whole-system approach. Trauma-informed training that is accessible to a wide range of organisations, sectors and frontline staff, from receptionists through to project leads and directors, is a key part of that. In Rochdale, practitioners identified their own personal ‘aha moments’ that allowed them to deepen their practice. ‘Aha moments’ included the opportunity to discuss trauma with a family, reflective practitioner spaces as well as seeing the impact of non-trauma-informed work. Understanding these journeys of personal and professional development allows a system to harness a variety of opportunities to build people’s skills and to develop an ongoing culture of learning.

• Spreading the story of trauma-informed practice: A whole-system trauma-informed approach requires buy-in and a collective vision, held up and supported by a range of services, organisations and stakeholders. Strong communications and a selection of effective tools and resources that are engaging, easily accessible and clearly describe the impact of trauma-informed support is a foundation for scaling best practice and driving system-wide change. As part of this, senior leaders’ role in re-emphasising the significance of this work is vital. In Rochdale, system leaders visibly made a number of pledges. These included commitments to embedding trauma-informed principles across organisational strategies and policies, continuously working with people with lived experience to improve practice and supporting staff to train, learn and reflect. Pledges were recorded, and are ready to be shared and posted to keep building momentum, motivating staff and demonstrating system readiness and urgency.