Language Matters: Trauma-Informed Writing in Work with Children & Families

Join the Compassionate Leeds programme team to explore how the language we use in assessments, reports, and professional records can be a powerful tool to build trust, maintain curiosity, and support a compassionate, trauma-informed way of working.

This session is designed to help practitioners reflect on how written language can either reinforce or reduce power imbalances, and how small shifts in wording can make a big difference to how children, young people, and families experience services.

Outcomes:

Recognise how language in assessments and professional writing can support a trauma-informed approach.

Identify examples of survival adaptations in children and families that may be misinterpreted as resistance or non-compliance.

Reframe commonly used phrases using trauma-informed, strengths-based language.

Who can attend?

This session is open to any professional who writes about children, young people, and families as part of their role. This includes (but is not limited to):

• Teachers and SENCOs writing EHCP applications
• Social workers and early help practitioners
• Child protection conference chairs and minute takers
• Youth justice, health, and voluntary sector staff
• Anyone contributing to assessments, reports, or records that impact children and families

Background:

The Compassionate Leeds programme came about in response to feedback and reflections from families and young people and professionals in Leeds as part of Future in Mind consultations and conversations, regarding experiences of adversity for children and young people in Leeds, and growing evidence for adversity aware, trauma informed system change. The Compassionate Leeds strategy, published in 2023, describes the ambition for Leeds to become a trauma informed city and sets out an approach to achieving this. This included the formation of a new Compassionate Leeds programme team, a multi-agency team responsible for cultivating a trauma informed approach to respond to the impact of trauma and adversity in the lives of young people in Leeds.

The Compassionate Leeds programme team is helping services, teams and individuals, from across the multi-agency partnership (health, education, social care, third sector) of support for children, young people and families, on their trauma-informed journey. Through sharing information, facilitating reflection and cultivating curiosity, the team help others to weave trauma informed approaches into their ways of thinking, doing and being, whether that is as practitioners, operational managers or strategic leaders.

You can find more information regarding the programme team on the Compassionate Leeds Trauma Informed Information Hub or email itipcommunityofpractice@leeds.gov.uk.