‘I was detecting a kind of, a from the heart kind of dialogue’: understanding the role of reflective spaces for transitional safeguarding innovation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The ESRC funded Innovate Project has explored how innovation is undertaken and experienced by professionals tasked with the responsibility of introducing new practice approaches in welfare provision for young people at risk of harm outside the home. This paper reports on our experiences of facilitating reflective discussion groups for professionals engaged in introducing Transitional Safeguarding into welfare settings in the UK. Within these reflective spaces we became aware of how the emotional impact of innovation is under-recognised and needs to be attended to, in order to ensure that the investment of peoples’ time and energy, alongside public monies, is not compromised. We draw on the psychoanalytic concepts of borderline states and the analytic third to highlight how such reflective spaces can provide the ‘emotional infrastructure’ to protect and promote the efficacy of innovation in challenging contexts.