‘It’s a tough gig’: Can reflective practice groups support senior leaders in child welfare manage anxiety and provide containment for others?

Senior leaders are responsible for providing containment for practitioners navigating the emotional challenges of complex safeguarding work with children and families. This requires attention to the defences, uncertainties, and anxieties that such leadership responsibilities provoke. However, little is written about the stress and anxieties experienced by leaders or the supportive mechanisms they need. Creating containment across an organization with limited reflective space is a difficult task. This article explores whether psycho-socially informed Reflective Practice Groups (RPGs) provide emotional containment for leaders in child safeguarding. RPGs are a facilitated, structured group-based method of reflection designed to contain anxiety generated by health and social care practice. While RPGs have been successful for frontline practitioners, their potential for senior leaders has been unexplored. RPGs were held monthly with fifty participants across five organizations over a six-month period. Focus groups were conducted before and after the RPGs ended to assess the impact from the participants’ perspectives. Findings suggest that RPGs help contain anxiety by offering a space for collective reflection on the complexity of leadership. By promoting professional connectedness, participants reported reduced isolation and reliance on unhelpful defences mechanisms, potentially contributing to more emotionally containing conditions for both leaders and those that they lead.