What the chair asked of me: on safeguarding, gut feeling, and the workers the system takes for granted.

Susana Carr

Yesterday, on a team away day, we did an exercise. We took it in turns to sit on a chair, and from that chair to speak as a child placed with one of our foster carers. We voiced what we would want from the agency, from the system, from the adults around us. The structure of the exercise is simple. The practice of it is not.

I had not expected to find it difficult. I had brought to the day a list of things I needed to think through with the team, a couple of policy questions, and a quiet hope that the day would put a small distance between me and the safeguarding work that has been sitting on the desk for the last several weeks. The chair did not do that. The chair did something else.

This post is for anyone in a caring or frontline profession (social workers, foster carers, NHS staff, teachers, anyone whose work involves repeatedly noticing what is wrong in other people's lives) who has been feeling the cost of doing it. It is about three things at once: what safeguarding work does to the body, what the body knows in return, and the structural conditions that determine whether either of those facts is allowed to matter.

What the body has been holding

The last several weeks have been an unusually high volume of safeguarding work for the agency I run. I have been holding four concurrent safeguarding matters on top of the ordinary Registered Manager workload, alongside a short-staffed team that is stretched, and underneath the inspection regime that hovers over all of it.

For anyone unfamiliar with what 'four concurrent safeguarding matters' actually involves day to day, here is the shape of the work. Reading every piece of information that arrives, in any format, from any source. Writing the management oversight notes. Drafting and quality-assuring the referral forms. Composing the emails to local authorities, schools, GPs, IROs and LADOs, in the language each of them requires. Sitting in the strategy meetings and the consultations and the LADO meetings. Doing the supervisions of the staff who are themselves working the cases. Holding the chronology of each matter in your head so that when a new piece of information arrives, you can immediately see whether it changes the picture.

That last one is the one that makes the head feel like it is going to pop.

By the end of the third week of this volume, I knew, in my body, what state I was in. Frazzled. Brain like a sieve. A brick of sadness in the chest that did not belong to any one matter in particular. The feeling that my system was holding more than it was designed to hold.

This is the body that walked into the away day.

What came up in the chair

The exercise asked us to speak as a child. What I noticed first was how hard it was to let myself fully into the role. As soon as I tried, the recent matters arrived in the room with me.

We have, of course, no way of knowing what is true on any of those matters yet. There is due process. Investigations are happening. The allegations may turn out to be 'founded' or 'unfounded', 'substantiated' or 'unsubstantiated'. I hold all of those possibilities open, and the team and I will work them through professionally.

What I could not do, in the chair, was hold the possibilities open in my body. The body had already been carrying the question of what if it is true every day for weeks. The chair was simply the first place where the body got asked the question directly, and was given permission to answer.

What came up was a sadness broader than the matters currently on my desk. A sadness about the possibility that a child placed with a carer, after removal from birth family, may still be living with fear, or neglect, or harm, and that the system around them (including me, including us) may not yet know.

I cried, briefly. We went on with the exercise. Each person took a turn. Each person, in their own way, found something difficult in it.

What the team had to say

After the exercise we reflected. We talked about the matters currently on our desks. We talked about what our guts had been telling us at different points. We talked about whether the existing processes had been adequate to what our bodies were already noticing.

The sentence that came up, in different voices, more times than I can count, was this:

I felt something was off, in my gut.

What people described was something quieter and more disturbing than missed evidence: a body-level sense, often without the data to back it up, that something was not right. And then the question that follows: what are we meant to do with that?

Gut feeling as professional knowledge

This is the part of the post that took longest to write, because it sits across a line that has to be held carefully.

Two things are true about a gut feeling, and we have to hold both at the same time.

The first is that a gut feeling cannot be used to remove a child, to end a placement, or to make a formal finding. The floor under our practice is evidence, due process, and the right people making the right decisions. That floor has to stay where it is.

The second is that a gut feeling carries information. Bodies that have spent thousands of hours in family homes, in meetings, in case files, in conversations with carers and children, develop a kind of pattern-recognition that the conscious mind does not always catch up with. The body sees what the cognitive checklist is not designed to see.

Harry Ferguson named this in social work scholarship over a decade ago. In <i>Child Protection Practice</i> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), he wrote about the embodied nature of safeguarding work: the practitioner's body is part of how the assessment happens, alongside the case file and the chronology. Many social workers read him during training. The structural support that would let us act on what he wrote has been slower to arrive.

The risk in our profession is that we have been trained to discount the gut feeling, because we know it is not evidence. So we wait. Sometimes the evidence arrives. Sometimes it arrives late. Sometimes it does not arrive at all.

What our team decided yesterday is that we would change one practice. We would share the gut feeling with the local authority earlier, even when we cannot yet point to a fact. We would offer it as information one professional is passing to another, so they can put it alongside something they may be seeing on their side, with the limits of our knowing made clear.

So many of the published serious case reviews come down to information not having been shared between professionals. When the information is reconstructed afterwards, it often turns out that more than one person had a feeling, and did not say it, because they did not feel they had earned the right to say it. We are going to say it.

The other side of safeguarding work

The case for honouring the body has another side, and the post would be dishonest if I did not name it.

The volume of process around any safeguarding matter is significant, for good reason. Each piece of paperwork exists because of a decision that had to be reconstructed, a chronology that had to be evidenced, a finding that had to be defensible. I would not advocate for less of that. The procedural rigour is part of how the system tries to protect the people inside it.

What the procedural rigour costs is bandwidth. Each matter is hours of writing. Each oversight note has to be defensible to the next inspector. Each referral form has to capture the right detail in the right boxes for the right professional. Add four concurrent matters to an ordinary supervisory load, and the bandwidth left for the relational work (the conversation with the carer, the call with the social worker, the act of actually noticing what the body is noticing) narrows sharply.

A few weeks ago I asked a local authority social worker how many cases she was holding. She said: 'Honestly, I don't really know. I stopped counting when it got into the mid-twenties.'

Twenty-plus children per worker. Each child a chronology, a network of professionals, a placement, a set of family contacts, a school. Each child a body that depends on an adult worker who has the bandwidth to notice what their body is noticing.

I do not know how anyone keeps a gut feeling intact under that load. The serious case reviews continue to come down to information not being shared between professionals. Anyone working in this field has seen the pattern. The concern is what we do with it.

The system rewards the workers who do not break

There is a structural problem inside this that we named yesterday and that I want to say out loud here.

The social workers who are good at this work, who notice, who hold complexity, who write clearly, who turn up, get given more work. Their good practice is recognised, and so the complex cases come to them. Their colleagues, with all the goodwill in the world, may not be as fast or as accurate or as steady, and so the cases route around them.

Two things happen next.

The 'good' social worker is taken for granted. The caseload climbs. The supervision time stays the same. The praise is plentiful and the structural support is not. Until, at some point, she burns out, or quietly decides to do the work to the letter and no further.

Either of those is a loss to the children she has been holding. Neither of those is an individual failing. The system is operating exactly as it is designed to operate: it preserves itself by funnelling complexity toward the people who can take it, until they cannot, and then it does the same with the next person.

This is the part of the post I find hardest to write. There is no neat resolution for it. There is also no excuse for not naming it.

What the work needs

The work needs bodies that are listened to. By their owners, first, and by the structures around them, second.

For the worker, that means treating the body as part of the practice itself, in the same way we treat the case file and the chronology. Noticing the brick of sadness in the chest. The brain like a sieve. The head about to pop. The gut feeling that arrives before the evidence. These are information. They deserve the same professional respect we give to the data in the case file.

It also means having tools that meet the body in the body's own language. Body-based regulation tools (EFT, somatic practices, the right kind of breath work, the right kind of movement) do something that talking the case through cannot do at the same speed. They give the activation somewhere to go between exposures, so that the next safeguarding matter does not land on top of an undischarged one.

For the supervisor, manager or wellbeing lead, that means treating workforce wellbeing as part of safeguarding practice itself, sitting alongside the case work rather than in a separate column on the budget line. A burnt-out social worker cannot keep a child safe. A worker whose nervous system has been holding three child protection cases for six months without space to discharge is not in a position to notice a fourth one accurately. The body of the worker is part of the safeguarding apparatus, and we are currently treating it as if it were not.

For the system, that means caseload caps that respect what a human nervous system can actually hold. It means information sharing between professionals that does not wait for evidence to be perfect. It means recognising that the social workers who appear to be coping may simply not yet be visibly failing, and that we have been mistaking those two states for the same thing.

The system fix is a collective effort. What yesterday gave me is a clear sense of what I would like our agency's contribution to be: to keep treating the bodies of the workers and the bodies of the children as connected pieces of the same puzzle.

A note for individual frontline workers

If you have been reading this and recognising yourself, what I would offer is the smallest, most portable starting move available: a guided EFT session, two to five minutes, used in the moments your body is asking for somewhere to put what it is holding.

There is a free one at www.mytappyplace.co.uk/free-session.

The tool gives you a way to keep your body functional inside the system as it currently is. The wider system change is a different conversation, with commissioners and policy. The body work belongs to you in the meantime, and that matters.

A note for managers, supervisors and wellbeing leads

If you supervise frontline workers, ask your team this question: 'what is currently sitting with you, and what is the work asking of you that the system is not resourcing?'. It will get you a more useful answer than 'are you struggling?', which most workers will manage with a 'fine'.

If you are weighing wellbeing offers for your team, the question worth asking the provider is: 'does this give my staff something to do, in their bodies, in the minute they have, between a difficult conversation and the next one?' If the answer is no, the offer will not reach the gap where most of the harm to your workforce is happening.

MyTappyPlace is built for that gap. Workshop options for teams are at www.mytappyplace.co.uk. The app is launching shortly.

The fact that we have to build dedicated body-based tools for the frontline workforce, in 2026, in this country, is itself a comment on where the structural support currently sits. I would rather have the tools and the conversation than not have them.