Applying Transactional Analysis to UK child protection meetings, examining how multi-agency meeting dynamics maintain dysfunction despite reform efforts, with evidence-based practice approaches matched to family system proximity.
Every week across the UK, professionals gather in child protection meetings that aim to safeguard children yet somehow manage to confirm every family's worst fears about the system. Parents arrive expecting help but find themselves in procedural encounters where defensive language and meeting structures designed to manage organisational risk override the human connections necessary for meaningful engagement. These meetings remain perhaps the clearest example of what happens when well-intentioned reforms collide with deeply embedded organisational patterns—like telling someone to "just relax" whilst simultaneously reaching for handcuffs.
The fundamental contradiction in UK child protection work has grown sharper as local authorities face increasing demands whilst resources shrink. Professionals genuinely committed to supporting families find themselves constrained by systems that prioritise procedural compliance over relationship building (Munro, 2011; MacAlister, 2022). This creates a peculiar dynamic where the very meetings designed to assess children's safety become venues for what Eileen Munro termed "defensive practice"—professionals making decisions to protect themselves from potential criticism rather than to help families (Munro, 2019). It's rather like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic whilst claiming this constitutes a comprehensive approach to maritime safety.
Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis offers a framework for understanding how these patterns maintain themselves across decades of reform efforts. TA examines the ego states (Parent, Adult, Child) from which people communicate and the predictable patterns—or "games"—that emerge when communication occurs at crossed purposes (Berne, 1961, 1964). When applied to child protection meetings, TA reveals how organisational structures and professional roles create communication patterns that maintain dysfunction despite everyone's best intentions. The system operates rather like a broken record that continues playing the same damaged section regardless of how many times someone promises to fix it.
This essay explores child protection meeting dynamics through the lens of TA whilst introducing the concept of "system proximity"—the distance between professionals and the direct experience of family life. As we shall see, those furthest from direct family contact often hold greatest decision-making power whilst operating from ego states that prioritise procedural compliance over meaningful engagement. This creates a peculiar inversion where those least equipped to understand family reality make decisions with greatest impact whilst those closest to families find their voices systematically diminished. It's the professional equivalent of asking someone who's never left London to provide detailed directions around rural Scotland—technically possible through maps and guidelines, but missing rather a lot of practical context.
Through examining actual meeting dynamics, the "games" that emerge between different professional roles, and the structural factors that maintain these patterns, we can begin to understand why reform efforts consistently fail to transform practice. More importantly, we might identify what would need to change for these meetings to become genuinely useful rather than elaborate exercises in shared anxiety management. Though given the current trajectory, betting on meaningful transformation requires more optimism than the evidence readily supports. Still, understanding why the system maintains its dysfunction is rather more useful than pretending everything's fine whilst families continue experiencing the consequences.
Eric Berne developed Transactional Analysis in the 1950s as a framework for understanding interpersonal dynamics through observable communication patterns. At its core, TA proposes that people communicate from three distinct ego states: Parent (incorporating attitudes and behaviours learned from parental figures), Adult (responding to present reality with available information), and Child (reacting from childhood experiences and feelings) (Berne, 1961). These are not mere metaphors but observable patterns in how people speak, behave, and respond to others. A social worker speaking from Critical Parent ego state sounds distinctly different from one operating in Adult—though both might claim to be providing "professional assessment."
Crucially, TA distinguishes between complementary transactions (where responses come from the expected ego state) and crossed transactions (where responses come from unexpected ego states, disrupting communication). When a manager addresses staff from Parent ego state expecting Child compliance but receives Adult questioning instead, the transaction crosses—often producing defensiveness rather than dialogue. This becomes particularly significant in child protection meetings where power dynamics, professional roles, and organisational anxiety create fertile ground for crossed transactions that everyone pretends not to notice.
Berne's concept of "games" describes predictable patterns of interaction that maintain dysfunction whilst appearing to pursue legitimate goals (Berne, 1964). Games have clear structures: an initial "hook" that draws others in, a series of transactions that seem reasonable, a moment where the pattern becomes clear (the "switch"), and a final payoff where all players end up confirming their existing positions. The game "Yes, But" in professional settings illustrates this beautifully: one person presents a problem apparently seeking solutions, others offer suggestions, each suggestion gets dismissed ("Yes, but that won't work because..."), and everyone ends up frustrated whilst the problem remains comfortably unsolved (Stewart & Joines, 1987). Rather like committee meetings where everyone expresses grave concern whilst ensuring nothing actually changes.
Understanding these patterns becomes particularly important when examining organisational systems where multiple professionals operate under different pressures, with different levels of proximity to family life, and varying degrees of power to influence outcomes. The same dynamics that maintain dysfunctional individual relationships operate at organisational level—but with rather more paperwork and considerably greater consequences for children and families.
The concept of "system proximity" describes how far professionals are positioned from direct contact with families and the lived reality of their circumstances. Those with high system proximity—frontline social workers, health visitors, teachers—experience daily contact with children and parents, witness actual family dynamics, and must navigate the messy reality of trying to effect change in complex situations (Ferguson, 2011). Those with low system proximity—managers, legal advisors, senior administrators—make decisions based on written reports, brief presentations in meetings, and organisational policies designed to manage risk. The irony lies in how decision-making power often inversely correlates with system proximity: those furthest from direct family experience frequently hold greatest authority over outcomes (Munro, 2011).
This distance creates predictable TA patterns. Professionals with low proximity can more easily maintain Critical Parent ego states because they encounter families primarily as "cases" in meetings rather than as actual people with whom they must build working relationships. A senior manager reviewing a case file can readily adopt positions like "These parents need to demonstrate..." or "The threshold for intervention has clearly been met..." without experiencing the human complexity that frontline workers navigate daily. It's rather like planning military strategy from comfortable offices far from actual battlefields—technically competent but disconnected from the reality soldiers experience.
This proximity gradient shapes not only individual communication patterns but entire organisational cultures. Professionals closest to families often develop pragmatic approaches that recognise complexity and the limits of professional power to "change" people (Forrester et al., 2018). Those furthest from direct contact can maintain idealistic positions about what families "should" do precisely because they don't have to navigate the actual challenges of engaging with defensive parents, limited resources, and the messy reality of trying to support families whilst simultaneously assessing risk. The system maintains this arrangement because it serves organisational needs—someone has to make difficult decisions, and it's considerably easier to do so without direct exposure to the human impact.
Research on professional decision-making in child protection consistently identifies how organisational culture and defensive practice shape outcomes (Munro, 2010; Forrester et al., 2013). Professionals operate within systems that punish perceived failures (when serious case reviews examine what went wrong) far more than they reward successful family support work (which rarely generates headlines or organisational scrutiny). This creates cultures where professionals unconsciously collude in patterns that prioritise procedural compliance over meaningful engagement—a collective game of "covering ourselves" that everyone plays whilst pretending the real goal is helping families.
Stephen Karpman's Drama Triangle, developed within TA framework, describes a predictable pattern where people unconsciously adopt roles of Rescuer, Persecutor, or Victim (Stewart & Joines, 1987). In child protection work, these roles manifest with remarkable clarity. Professionals often begin in Rescuer position ("I'm here to help this family"), which invites families into Victim position ("You don't understand how hard this is"). When families don't respond as hoped, professionals slide into Persecutor position ("You're not engaging appropriately"), whilst families alternate between Victim ("Nobody helps us") and Persecutor ("You're just here to take my children"). Everyone involved cycles through these positions whilst the fundamental issues remain unaddressed—rather like participants in a particularly exhausting dance where everyone knows the steps but nobody can leave the floor.
The Drama Triangle becomes institutionalised in child protection systems through meeting structures and professional roles. Child protection conferences typically position families in Victim role (subject to assessment and decision-making by others), social workers fluctuate between Rescuer (when presenting support offered) and Persecutor (when describing concerns), whilst management occupies Persecutor position (demanding evidence of risk management) or Rescuer (when defending organisational reputation). The dance continues with remarkable consistency across different families, different local authorities, and different political administrations—suggesting something more fundamental than individual professional competence is at play.
Understanding these patterns through TA framework reveals why standard reform approaches consistently fail. Changing procedures, introducing new assessment tools, or providing additional training addresses surface features whilst leaving underlying transactional patterns intact. It's rather like rearranging furniture whilst the building's foundations remain structurally unsound—cosmetically different but fundamentally unchanged. To genuinely transform practice would require acknowledging these unconscious patterns and how organisational structures maintain them. Which explains why it rarely happens: recognising the problem would necessitate admitting how deeply embedded these dynamics are in supposedly "child-centred" systems.
UK child protection conferences follow highly prescribed formats outlined in Working Together to Safeguard Children (Department for Education, 2023). This structure—opening statements, professional reports, family contribution, multi-agency discussion, decision-making—appears designed for clarity and fairness. Yet from TA perspective, this structure constitutes a "script" that determines roles, limits spontaneity, and maintains established patterns regardless of individual participants' intentions (Berne, 1964). Everyone knows their lines; deviations from the script generate anxiety rather than welcomed as genuine engagement.
The chair opens meetings with scripted reassurances about the process being "supportive" and "collaborative," establishing what TA terms a "social level" transaction (appearing helpful) that masks the "psychological level" reality (power dynamics and predetermined outcomes). Parents receive invitation to participate whilst simultaneously learning they've already been assessed, concerns documented, and options narrowed. This double message—simultaneously claiming "you're important to this process" whilst demonstrating "we've already decided you're inadequate"—creates what TA identifies as a contaminated communication that makes genuine dialogue nearly impossible (Stewart & Joines, 1987).
Professional reports follow predictable formats: developmental concerns about children, parenting capacity assessments, documentation of previous interventions. Each professional presents from Parent ego state (authoritative knowledge about what families need) whilst carefully avoiding Adult ego state questions about whether these assessments actually lead to improved outcomes for children. The structure prevents asking awkward questions like "Given that our previous 17 interventions haven't resolved these issues, might we be missing something fundamental about this family's situation?" Such Adult-to-Adult inquiry would disrupt the script and generate organisational anxiety. Better to maintain the fiction that adding more services to an ineffective plan will somehow produce different results.
When families contribute, the structure places them in inherently defensive positions. They must respond to documented concerns, address professional assessments of their parenting, and demonstrate "insight" into problems as defined by others. Any parent response that challenges professional conclusions gets interpreted as "lacking insight" or "failing to engage appropriately"—a perfect example of TA's concept of a "bind" where no winning response exists (Berne, 1964). Parents who agree with concerns appear to confirm professional assessments; parents who disagree demonstrate poor insight. Rather like asking someone "When did you stop being a terrible parent?"—the question itself precludes any satisfactory answer.
This scripted structure serves organisational needs by managing anxiety, distributing responsibility, and ensuring decisions can withstand later scrutiny. It does not, however, facilitate the genuine dialogue, relationship building, or collaborative problem-solving that evidence suggests actually helps families (Forrester et al., 2012, 2018). The script continues because it fulfils its real function: protecting organisations and professionals from criticism. That it fails to effectively protect children or support families remains a problem everyone acknowledges in principle whilst maintaining in practice.
Different professional roles in child protection conferences correlate with predictable ego state patterns that shape meeting dynamics. Understanding these patterns reveals how individual professionals, despite good intentions, collectively maintain dysfunctional systems through their complementary transactions.
Independent Chairs: Parent Ego State Dominance
Conference chairs typically operate from Controlling Parent ego state, managing proceedings, enforcing rules, and ensuring proper protocol. Their role requires making judgements about competing professional opinions whilst appearing neutral—a contradiction that produces characteristic communication patterns. Chairs regularly deploy phrases like "I'm hearing that..." or "The conference needs to consider..." which sound Adult (rational, present-focused) but function as Parent (directive, controlling). When families or professionals raise concerns that threaten meeting structure or predetermined outcomes, chairs redirect discussion back to "the process"—maintaining the script rather than addressing substance.
This Parent dominance serves specific organisational functions. Chairs must ensure conferences produce defensible decisions that withstand potential legal challenge. This necessitates following procedures precisely, documenting everything appropriately, and managing any expressions of conflict or disagreement that might complicate later justification. The chair becomes guardian of organisational anxiety, containing threat through procedural control rather than engaging with the underlying issues that generate anxiety in the first place. Rather like a traffic warden who enforces parking regulations whilst the entire street floods—technically competent but spectacularly missing the point.
Research on conference outcomes suggests chairs significantly influence decisions through how they frame discussion, whose contributions they validate, and which "threshold" language they employ (Bell & Thoburn, 2015). Yet chairs rarely undergo training in recognising their own ego state patterns or how these shape professional dynamics. The assumption appears to be that following procedure neutralises bias—a proposition roughly as plausible as claiming that reading instructions eliminates the need for cooking experience. Chairs maintain dysfunctional patterns not through malice but through unconscious participation in scripts that serve organisational needs over family ones.
Social Workers: Oscillating Ego States
Frontline social workers occupy uniquely conflicted positions in child protection conferences. They must simultaneously build relationships with families (requiring Adult or Nurturing Parent transactions), assess risk (demanding Adult analysis), and present concerns in ways that justify organisational interventions (often slipping into Critical Parent). This produces characteristic oscillation between ego states that other professionals interpret as inconsistency whilst families experience as fundamental untrustworthiness (Dale, 2004; Spratt & Callan, 2004).
Consider a typical scenario: a social worker who has developed working relationship with a family must present at conference documenting parental "failings" to justify continued intervention. The social worker's written report, shaped by supervision demanding evidence of risk, emphasises concerns from Critical Parent position. Yet in the meeting, the same worker might advocate for family strengths, speaking from Nurturing Parent or Adult. Other professionals interpret this inconsistency as the social worker being "too close" to the family or "lacking objectivity"—both coded ways of saying the worker has developed actual relationship that complicates neat categorisation of the family as inadequate.
This split between relationship and risk assessment reflects fundamental contradictions in UK child protection policy, which simultaneously emphasises relationship-based practice and defensive risk management (Ruch, 2007). Social workers navigate these contradictions through ego state oscillation—but at considerable personal cost. Research on social worker retention consistently identifies stress from these conflicts as a primary factor in workforce instability (MacAlister, 2022). The system demands professionals occupy incompatible positions simultaneously whilst appearing confident in their assessments. Small wonder many eventually decide to work in different fields where the contradictions are less pronounced.
Health Visitors and Teachers: Adaptive Child Compliance
Professionals from other agencies attending child protection conferences often demonstrate what TA identifies as Adapted Child ego state—complying with meeting structure and social work leadership whilst suppressing their own professional judgement when it conflicts with dominant narratives. Health visitors and teachers typically have more frequent, less formal contact with families than social workers. This proximity often generates different perspectives on family functioning—perspectives that get lost in conference dynamics dominated by social work framing (Horwath, 2005).
Health visitors, for instance, might recognise that a mother's depression stems partly from social isolation and limited resources rather than inherent inadequacy. Yet in conferences where discussion centres on parental deficits, raising this contextual understanding risks being interpreted as "minimising concerns" or "failing to recognise risk." Teachers might observe that a child's behaviour improves significantly with consistent structure and positive attention—suggesting relatively straightforward interventions—but conferences focus on documenting concerning behaviour rather than exploring what actually helps. These professionals learn to frame contributions in ways acceptable to dominant narratives, suppressing Adult observations that might disrupt conference script.
This Adapted Child compliance maintains dysfunctional patterns by eliminating genuine multi-agency perspective. Different professionals bring different knowledge bases, relationships, and insights—precisely the diversity needed for understanding complex family situations. Yet meeting structures and power dynamics effectively silence dissenting views, producing false consensus that everyone recognises as hollow but nobody disrupts. The result resembles the child's story of the Emperor's New Clothes—everyone pretends to see elaborate garments whilst privately recognising the emperor's nakedness. Except in child protection conferences, pointing out this reality threatens your professional standing rather than earning admiration for honesty.
Berne's concept of psychological games illuminates how child protection conferences maintain dysfunction whilst appearing purposeful. These games involve predictable patterns of interaction that seem aimed at solving problems but actually function to avoid genuine change whilst confirming participants' existing positions. Understanding these games reveals why meetings consistently fail to transform outcomes despite everyone's stated commitment to "putting children first."
"Why Don't You—Yes, But" (WDYYB)
This classic TA game manifests repeatedly in child protection meetings when discussing plans for families. Social workers present family "needs," other professionals suggest interventions, and each suggestion gets dismissed: "Yes, but we've already tried that," "Yes, but the family won't engage with that service," "Yes, but there's a six-month waiting list." The game continues until everyone feels frustrated, the original problem remains unresolved, and participants confirm their belief that "nothing works with these families" (Stewart & Joines, 1987).
The psychological payoff for playing WDYYB lies in confirming helplessness whilst avoiding responsibility for change. Social workers get to demonstrate they've explored options (satisfying organisational demands) whilst maintaining position that families are resistant (justifying continued monitoring without effective intervention). Other professionals demonstrate concern (fulfilling their safeguarding responsibilities) whilst avoiding actual commitment of resources or time. Families watch this performance, correctly identifying that nobody actually intends to provide meaningful help, which reinforces their view that professionals are "just going through motions."
Breaking out of WDYYB requires someone operating from Adult ego state to name the pattern and refuse to continue playing. This rarely happens because doing so generates anxiety and threatens collegial relationships. Much safer to continue the game, document the "challenge" of working with this family, and schedule another meeting where the same pattern will replay. After all, identifying that everyone's colluding in maintaining dysfunction is rather less comfortable than pretending we're all doing our best in difficult circumstances.
"Harried" (Organisational Variant)
In the TA game "Harried," one player takes on too many commitments, struggles to fulfil them, and receives sympathy rather than accountability for inevitable failures (Berne, 1964). Child protection systems play this game at organisational level: social workers carry unrealistic caseloads, managers bemoan limited resources, everyone acknowledges the system is overwhelmed—yet the underlying structure remains unchanged. The payoff lies in diffusing responsibility: nobody can be blamed for poor outcomes when "the system" is recognised as fundamentally inadequate.
Conference discussions regularly feature "Harried" dynamics. Plans for families include multiple interventions requiring extensive coordination, assessment work, and monitoring. Everyone recognises these plans exceed available resources and worker capacity. Yet pointing this out directly—suggesting that agreeing unrealistic plans serves no useful purpose—threatens to disrupt the game. Better to document comprehensive plans that everyone knows won't be fully implemented, schedule review conferences where inevitable failures will be noted, and continue the cycle. The organisational anxiety about potential criticism if something goes wrong gets managed through planning everything whilst accomplishing little.
This game becomes particularly destructive when families attempt to engage with agreed plans only to discover services aren't available, workers are overwhelmed, or coordination between agencies never materialises. Families who initially approached conferences with hope—believing professionals' statements about "working together"—learn that the system operates primarily to manage its own anxiety rather than to provide genuine support. This produces the defensive, hostile family responses that professionals then cite as evidence of "failure to engage appropriately." Rather brilliantly, the system creates the very resistance it claims justifies its interventions.
"If It Weren't For Them" (Blame Games)
This game involves attributing responsibility for failures to others, thereby avoiding examination of one's own contributions to problems (Stewart & Joines, 1987). In child protection conferences, this game plays out through mutual blame between agencies: social workers blame health services for not providing timely assessments, health professionals blame education for not sharing information, schools blame families for not attending appointments, families blame social services for not providing help. Everyone identifies what others should do differently; nobody examines how their own participation maintains dysfunction.
The psychological payoff lies in preserving professional identity: "I'm competent; failures result from others' inadequacy." Yet this game particularly damages inter-agency working because it prevents genuine reflection on systemic issues. When professionals focus on what other agencies should do, conferences produce action plans that depend on external factors outside participants' control—guaranteeing plans will fail whilst providing ready explanations for why. The game maintains itself through successive conferences where each agency documents how others didn't fulfil expectations, confirms their own helplessness to effect change alone, and agrees to try again with similar results.
Families experience this as professionals unanimously agreeing that change is needed whilst simultaneously demonstrating that nobody accepts responsibility for facilitating it. Parents leave conferences with lists of appointments to attend, services to access, and changes to demonstrate—but minimal confidence that the system will provide coordinated support. When families struggle with these expectations (predictably, given the chaos of their lives and the poor coordination they've experienced previously), their "failure" justifies escalating intervention rather than prompting critical examination of whether the system's approach makes sense. It's accountability theatre: everyone performs concern whilst avoiding actual responsibility for outcomes.
Child protection systems exhibit a peculiar structural feature: those with greatest direct knowledge of families often hold least decision-making power, whilst those making critical decisions operate at significant remove from family reality. This "proximity gradient" fundamentally shapes communication patterns in child protection meetings, determining which voices carry weight and whose perspectives get dismissed as "too subjective" or "lacking professional distance."
Frontline social workers, with high system proximity, spend hours observing family dynamics, building relationships, and navigating the messy complexity of trying to support change whilst assessing risk. They witness contradictory behaviours that resist neat categorisation: parents who genuinely love their children but struggle with consistency, children who are resilient in some contexts but vulnerable in others, progress that occurs unevenly rather than following neat trajectories professionals prefer (Ferguson, 2011). This proximity generates nuanced understanding but also professional humility about the limits of intervention—neither of which conferences readily accommodate.
Managers and senior practitioners, with moderate proximity, review case files and supervise workers but rarely spend extended time with families. They know families through professional narratives filtered through recording requirements, supervision discussions shaped by organisational anxieties about risk, and brief meeting presentations where complex situations get condensed into bullet points. This distance paradoxically increases confidence: removed from direct complexity, they can more readily maintain positions about what families "should" do and what workers "need to" require (Munro, 2010). It's rather easier to demand parents demonstrate "consistent routines" when you haven't spent time in chaotic households where consistent routines require resources and stability these families fundamentally lack.
Conference chairs and legal advisors, with lowest proximity, engage with families primarily as "cases" discussed in meetings. They know families through reports written to justify intervention, presentations framed by concerns, and discussions structured around risk assessment. This extreme distance allows maintenance of Critical Parent ego states that would be difficult for those with direct contact: it's considerably easier to judge parents' adequacy when you've never met them, never experienced their circumstances, and never had to build working relationship whilst simultaneously assessing whether their children are safe.
Yet decision-making power inversely correlates with this proximity. Chairs determine what gets discussed and how decisions get framed. Legal advisors interpret thresholds for intervention. Managers decide which interventions are feasible given resources. Frontline workers, despite knowing most about actual family functioning, primarily provide information that others interpret and judge. This inversion creates predictable communication patterns where those closest to families must translate their knowledge into language acceptable to those furthest removed—losing nuance, context, and complexity in the process (Munro, 2011).
Understanding system proximity illuminates why child protection systems consistently fail to identify what researchers term "disguised compliance"—families who appear to cooperate with interventions whilst maintaining patterns that endanger children (Reder et al., 1993). The concept emerged from serious case reviews examining why professionals missed signs of risk in families who seemed engaged. Yet framing this as families "disguising" their true nature fundamentally misunderstands the dynamic TA reveals.
From TA perspective, "disguised compliance" represents families playing games that professionals unconsciously invite through their own ego state transactions. When professionals approach families from Critical Parent ("You need to..."), families learn that challenging this produces negative consequences. Some respond with Adapted Child compliance: appearing to agree, attending appointments, saying what professionals want to hear—not because they're deliberately deceptive but because the system has taught them this behaviour minimises immediate threat whilst preserving dignity (Crittenden & DiLalla, 1988). It's the same dynamic children develop in abusive households: appearing compliant whilst maintaining private spaces that authorities don't penetrate. Rather than recognising how professionals' communication patterns produce this response, the system interprets it as evidence of family pathology requiring increased surveillance.
Patricia Crittenden's work on "compulsive compliance" in attachment relationships reveals how some children learn to suppress their own needs and become hypervigilant to others' expectations as survival strategy (Crittenden, 2006; Crittenden & Landini, 2011). This pattern continues into adulthood, particularly for people who experienced childhood neglect or abuse—precisely the population most likely to become subject of child protection interventions. When professionals approach these parents with demands for change, parents' historic coping mechanisms activate: comply outwardly, suppress authentic response, monitor authorities carefully for signs of threat. Professionals trained to spot "disguised compliance" interpret this as evidence requiring increased intervention, which reinforces the pattern. It's a beautifully dysfunctional feedback loop that everyone recognises as ineffective yet nobody quite knows how to escape.
System proximity matters here because professionals with direct family contact often recognise these patterns but lack language to explain them in ways acceptable to those with decision-making power. A social worker might understand that a mother's compliance reflects learned survival strategies rather than genuine engagement, but conferences demand assessment of "parental cooperation" in binary terms: either parents engage appropriately or they demonstrate concerning resistance. The nuanced reality—that this mother is doing exactly what her traumatic history taught her to do when faced with authorities—gets lost in translation between high and low proximity professionals.
Breaking this pattern requires approaching families from Adult ego state: acknowledging power dynamics openly, recognising how the system's structure invites particular responses, and collaborating on finding ways parents can maintain dignity whilst professionals can assess actual safety. Yet this requires conference participants to examine their own contributions to dysfunction—considerably more uncomfortable than labelling families as "manipulative" or "lacking insight." Small wonder the system maintains patterns that everyone agrees don't work: changing them would require acknowledging how professional behaviour shapes family responses. Much simpler to keep blaming families for playing games we've taught them to play.
The communication patterns that emerge across the system proximity gradient reveal fundamental contradictions in how child protection conferences function. Professionals with high proximity attempt to communicate nuanced, contextualised understanding of family functioning. Those with low proximity require simplified, categorical assessments that support decision-making. Neither group consciously intends to distort reality, yet the translation process systematically eliminates precisely the information most relevant to understanding what might actually help these families.
Consider how concerns get communicated upward through the system. A social worker observes that a mother struggles with consistent routines but responds well to practical support and structured encouragement. The worker's recording, shaped by supervision emphasising risk factors, documents "concerns about inconsistent routines" and notes previous interventions. The conference report, constrained by format requirements, lists "parenting capacity concerns—inconsistent routines" alongside other deficits. The conference discussion, dominated by assessment against threshold criteria, concludes "mother demonstrates limited insight into children's needs for consistency." By the time this travels through the proximity gradient, contextual understanding has vanished entirely, replaced by categorical judgement that supports predetermined conclusions.
This communication distortion occurs not through malice but through structural features of how organisations manage information and anxiety. Written reports serve accountability functions: they must document concerns clearly enough to justify intervention if later scrutinised. Meeting discussions serve decision-making functions: they must produce clear conclusions about risk levels and required actions. Neither format readily accommodates uncertainty, ambiguity, or contextual complexity—precisely the realities professionals with high proximity navigate daily (Munro, 2019). The system gradually filters out nuance until only categorical statements remain, which then get treated as though they represent complete understanding of family situations.
Professionals with low proximity often genuinely believe they understand families based on reports and presentations. They've read detailed chronologies, heard multiple agencies describe concerns, and observed patterns across cases. What they miss is how selective this information is—shaped at every stage by what gets recorded, what gets emphasised in supervision, what fits meeting formats, and what supports organisational narratives about risk and intervention (Forrester et al., 2013). It's rather like believing you understand a city because you've studied detailed maps: technically informative but missing the lived experience of actually navigating streets, encountering people, and experiencing the place beyond abstract representation.
This structural communication failure has profound implications. Families repeatedly describe feeling "not listened to" or "judged without being known"—accusations professionals dismiss as defensiveness or denial. Yet from TA perspective, families accurately identify a fundamental truth: the people making decisions about their lives don't actually know them. They know reports, categories, risk assessments—representations filtered through multiple professional lenses, each removing additional context. When conferences make decisions based on these filtered representations, families correctly perceive that nobody understands their actual circumstances, their genuine efforts, or the complexity of what they're navigating. The system then interprets families' frustration and resistance as confirming their inadequacy, completing a feedback loop where communication failure masquerades as family pathology.
No analysis of child protection conference dysfunction can ignore the structural context in which these meetings occur. Since 2010, UK local authorities have experienced the most severe sustained funding reductions in modern history, with children's services bearing disproportionate cuts despite rising demand (MacAlister, 2022). This creates what researchers term "crisis conditions" where professionals manage impossible caseloads, families wait months for basic services, and child protection systems expand their reach whilst providing decreasing actual support (Bywaters et al., 2018).
Paul Bywaters' extensive research demonstrates that child protection interventions correlate far more strongly with family poverty and deprivation than with individual parenting quality (Bywaters et al., 2016, 2018). Areas with highest deprivation have child protection intervention rates ten times higher than affluent areas—a disparity that cannot plausibly be explained by proportional differences in parenting capacity. This produces what researchers term an "inverse intervention law": families most in need of support services are most likely to receive surveillance and investigation instead, whilst families in better circumstances access supportive services that prevent problems escalating (Webb et al., 2020).
From TA perspective, austerity creates structural conditions where professionals unconsciously play organisational games to manage otherwise unbearable anxiety. Conferences cannot provide families with genuine support because resources don't exist; yet professionals must appear to be "doing something" to manage organisational and public anxiety about child safety. This produces elaborate plans that everyone knows exceed capacity, monitoring requirements that substitute for actual help, and escalating interventions that obscure the fundamental reality: the system cannot meet families' needs because political decisions have eliminated the resources that would allow it to do so.
The psychological games identified earlier—WDYYB, Harried, If It Weren't For Them—serve specific functions in this context. They allow professionals to maintain illusions of effectiveness whilst navigating fundamentally impossible situations. Conference participants discuss which interventions families need whilst carefully avoiding acknowledgement that these services either don't exist or have waiting lists measured in months. Everyone recognises this reality privately but naming it openly would require confronting how child protection work has become primarily an exercise in documenting failure rather than preventing it. Better to maintain collective fiction that families who don't improve despite receiving "comprehensive support" demonstrate inadequate commitment to change.
This structural analysis doesn't excuse individual professional behaviour or absolve organisations of responsibility for dysfunctional practices. But it contextualises why reform efforts focusing on procedures, training, or assessment tools consistently fail to transform outcomes. You cannot fix organisational dysfunction through better protocols when the fundamental problem is that the organisation lacks resources to do what evidence suggests would actually help families (Morris et al., 2018). It's rather like rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship whilst insisting that with proper planning, the vessel will reach port safely. Technically possible, but requiring levels of delusion that serve nobody's interests.
Eileen Munro's extensive work on child protection systems identifies how organisations unconsciously prioritise compliance with procedures over thoughtful practice that responds to individual family circumstances (Munro, 2010, 2011, 2019). This "compliance culture" emerged understandably following serious case reviews that criticised professionals for not following procedures. Yet the solution—ever-more-detailed protocols, increased recording requirements, standardised assessment tools—created new problems whilst failing to prevent ongoing tragedies.
From TA perspective, compliance culture represents organisational Adapted Child ego state: following rules to avoid punishment rather than engaging thoughtfully with complex reality. Professionals learn that deviating from procedures (even when professional judgement suggests deviation would better serve families) risks criticism if anything goes wrong. Conversely, following procedures provides protection: even if outcomes are poor, the professional "did everything by the book." This creates perverse incentives where professionals unconsciously prioritise documenting that they followed process over actually helping families.
Conference dynamics reflect this compliance orientation directly. Chairs ensure procedures are followed precisely. Reports adhere to prescribed formats. Decisions reference approved threshold criteria. Plans incorporate standard interventions. The entire performance demonstrates organisational compliance—but often bears little relationship to what might actually support this particular family in their specific circumstances. Yet questioning whether following procedure serves this family's needs would invite uncomfortable scrutiny: if procedures aren't appropriate, what does that suggest about the system designing them? Better to maintain the script than examine whether the play itself makes sense.
Research on "just culture" in high-reliability organisations suggests systems function best when they distinguish between individual errors (requiring learning and support) and systemic problems (requiring structural change), whilst focusing on learning rather than blame (Dekker, 2012). Child protection systems do precisely the opposite: they treat individual professional decisions as though they occur in vacuum (ignoring structural constraints and organisational pressures), respond to failures with blame and procedure modification (rather than examining systemic issues), and punish thoughtful risk-taking far more severely than unthinking rule-following (even when the latter produces poor outcomes).
This compliance culture maintains itself because it serves organisational anxiety management functions even whilst undermining effective practice. Conferences become rituals that demonstrate "we did everything properly"—regardless of whether these rituals actually protect children or support families. The psychological comfort of following prescribed procedure outweighs the discomfort of acknowledging that prescribed procedures often fail to address actual family needs. It's institutional Adapted Child behaviour writ large: doing what authorities demand to avoid punishment, regardless of effectiveness. Which explains why decades of procedure refinement have produced more elaborate compliance systems but haven't noticeably improved outcomes for children and families.
UK child protection systems invest extraordinary effort in assessing families—conducting detailed analyses of parenting capacity, children's developmental needs, and environmental factors. These assessments employ sophisticated frameworks and generate extensive documentation. Yet from TA perspective, they often represent what Berne termed "pastiming"—activity that appears purposeful but actually serves to avoid genuine engagement (Berne, 1964). Professionals assess families rather than working with them, producing reports about deficits rather than collaborating on solutions.
The Assessment Framework that dominated UK practice from 2000 onwards epitomises this dynamic (Department for Health, 2000, updated by Department for Education, 2023). It directs professionals to systematically gather information across multiple domains, analyse this information against developmental norms and parenting standards, and produce comprehensive judgements about family functioning. This sounds admirably thorough. In practice, it positions professionals as expert assessors who determine family adequacy whilst positioning families as subjects being judged—precisely the transactional pattern that invites defensive responses and "disguised compliance" (Broadhurst et al., 2009).
Conferences review these assessments, discuss additional assessment needs, and plan further assessments—creating what could be termed the "assessment trap." Families undergo multiple assessments by different agencies, each generating reports for professionals to review at meetings where they decide yet more assessment is needed. Meanwhile, time passes, family circumstances evolve, children continue experiencing inadequate care, and everyone documents that "further assessment" is required before effective intervention can occur. It's bureaucratic masturbation: extensive activity that feels purposeful but produces no useful outcome beyond demonstrating that activity occurred.
This pattern serves several organisational functions. Ongoing assessment justifies monitoring families without committing scarce resources to intervention. It generates documentation that can later demonstrate professionals "did everything possible" if outcomes are poor. It maintains illusion of professional activity and expertise even when actual capacity to help families is minimal. Most crucially, it avoids confronting the uncomfortable reality that most families known to child protection services need concrete resources—housing, money, childcare, mental health services—rather than additional professional assessment of why they're struggling (Bywaters, 2019).
From TA framework, assessment-focused practice represents organisations operating in Critical Parent ego state: judging families against standards, documenting deficits, demanding evidence of change. What remains absent is Adult-to-Adult engagement: acknowledging shared reality about limited resources, exploring what would genuinely help, recognising families' own expertise about their circumstances, and collaborating on realistic solutions rather than ideal ones. Assessment culture maintains itself because it serves professionals' and organisations' needs to feel purposeful and maintain control. That it fails to effectively help families or protect children remains regrettably secondary to these psychological and organisational functions.
Research on genuine alternatives to standard child protection conferences reveals what TA analysis would predict: approaches that position families as collaborators rather than subjects of assessment produce better outcomes whilst costing less than traditional interventions. Family Group Conferences (FGCs), developed in New Zealand and adopted across multiple jurisdictions, provide one such alternative that directly challenges the communication patterns this essay has examined (Pennell & Burford, 2000).
FGCs reverse the usual power dynamic. Rather than professionals assessing families and deciding interventions, extended family members meet privately to develop plans addressing identified concerns, with professionals available to provide information but excluded from decision-making. Research consistently shows FGCs produce plans that: reduce need for statutory intervention, maintain or improve child safety, cost significantly less than standard processes, and generate greater family satisfaction and engagement (Sundell & Vinnerljung, 2004; Dijkstra et al., 2016).
From TA perspective, FGCs succeed precisely because they establish Adult-to-Adult transactions. Professionals acknowledge concerns and what would constitute acceptable resolution, but recognise that families possess knowledge and resources professionals lack. Families develop solutions drawing on their understanding of their circumstances, relationships, and community resources. Plans emerge through genuine collaboration rather than professional prescription. The entire process respects family agency whilst maintaining focus on children's safety—a balance standard conferences rhetorically claim but structurally prevent.
Yet FGCs remain marginal in UK practice despite evidence of effectiveness. Why? Because they require organisations to relinquish control, acknowledge families' expertise, and tolerate uncertainty about outcomes—precisely what compliance-oriented, anxiety-driven systems find most difficult. FGCs generate less documentation, provide less opportunity for professionals to demonstrate they "did everything possible," and demand that professionals trust families' capacity to develop solutions. For systems operating in Critical Parent ego state, this represents intolerable loss of authority. Better to maintain familiar dysfunctional patterns than risk the anxiety that genuine family decision-making would generate. After all, if families can develop effective plans without professional prescription, what exactly is our function? Rather an uncomfortable question to examine.
Research by Donald Forrester and colleagues demonstrates that social workers' communication skills—particularly their capacity to maintain non-judgemental curiosity and demonstrate empathy—significantly predict outcomes for families (Forrester et al., 2012, 2018). Workers who demonstrate high empathy, active listening, and collaborative problem-solving achieve better engagement and outcomes than those who primarily advise, direct, or challenge parents. This research essentially validates TA principles: Adult-to-Adult transactions facilitate genuine change; Critical Parent communications generate resistance.
Motivational interviewing and other relational approaches provide practical frameworks for establishing Adult ego state transactions with families. Rather than telling parents what they should do (Critical Parent), workers explore parents' own concerns about their children, acknowledge ambivalence about change, and collaborate on identifying small achievable steps (Adult). This doesn't mean avoiding difficult conversations or minimising risk. It means conducting these conversations in ways that invite genuine engagement rather than defensive compliance (Forrester et al., 2012).
Yet translating these approaches into practice requires more than training workers in new techniques. It requires organisations to create conditions where workers can maintain relational focus rather than prioritising documentation, compliance, and risk avoidance. It requires conferences to value relationship quality between workers and families rather than treating this as "getting too close." It requires managers to support thoughtful risk-taking rather than demanding certainty and procedure-following. In other words, it requires transforming organisational culture—a considerably larger undertaking than providing training courses.
Some UK local authorities have experimented with systemic practice units—smaller teams with reduced caseloads, focusing on relationship-based work and evidence-based interventions. Research on these units shows promising outcomes: improved worker retention, better engagement with families, and reduced need for statutory interventions (Forrester et al., 2013). Yet wider adoption remains limited, partly due to resource implications but largely because such approaches challenge fundamental assumptions about how child protection should function. They require organisations to acknowledge that standard practice is ineffective, that procedure-following doesn't equal good practice, and that genuine family engagement matters more than documentation quality. Not comfortable conclusions for systems invested in maintaining current approaches.
Understanding system proximity suggests a radical reorganisation of how child protection work gets allocated. Rather than current arrangements where those furthest from families make key decisions whilst those closest to families primarily gather information, effective practice would match decision-making authority to proximity level whilst ensuring appropriate safeguards.
Professionals with highest proximity—frontline workers who know families directly—should hold primary decision-making authority about day-to-day practice: which interventions to try, how to engage families, how to interpret concerning behaviours in context. Their Adult ego state understanding of actual family functioning provides crucial information that gets lost when filtered through multiple reporting layers. However, this requires robust supervision that supports thoughtful risk assessment rather than demanding certainty and risk avoidance.
Professionals with moderate proximity—team managers and senior practitioners—should focus on ensuring systemic support for frontline practice: coordinating resources, facilitating inter-agency collaboration, providing consultation on complex situations. Their role should be supporting workers to make good decisions rather than making decisions themselves based on filtered information. From TA perspective, effective management operates from Adult ego state: acknowledging uncertainty, supporting thoughtful analysis, facilitating access to resources and expertise.
Professionals with lowest proximity—conference chairs, legal advisors, senior managers—should focus on systems-level functions: ensuring legal compliance, managing organisational risk, identifying systemic barriers to effective practice, advocating for adequate resources. Their distance from direct family contact makes them poorly positioned to judge individual family situations but well-positioned to examine whether systems support effective practice. Yet current arrangements do precisely the opposite: those furthest from families judge families' adequacy whilst those closest to families primarily document concerns for others to judge.
Implementing proximity-matched decision-making would require fundamental restructuring of accountability systems, legal frameworks, and organisational hierarchies—explaining why it won't happen through incremental reform. It challenges basic assumptions about professional authority, expertise, and oversight. Yet continuing current arrangements—where those least equipped to understand families make decisions with greatest impact whilst those best positioned to understand families have least authority—ensures dysfunction continues regardless of procedural refinements. Rather a significant structural problem that nobody quite knows how to address without dismantling and rebuilding the entire system. Which explains why we keep refining procedures instead.
Understanding child protection conference dysfunction through TA framework reveals that meaningful transformation requires changes far more fundamental than new assessment tools, revised procedures, or additional training. The patterns this essay has examined are not individual failings or isolated problems but systemic features that serve specific organisational and psychological functions. Changing them would require confronting uncomfortable truths about how current systems operate and accepting significant uncertainty about how alternatives might function.
Genuine transformation would need to begin with acknowledging what research and practice experience already demonstrate: standard child protection conferences as currently conducted are ineffective for most families. They consume enormous professional resources whilst generating minimal improvement in children's actual experiences. They maintain themselves not because they work but because they manage organisational anxiety about potential criticism if something goes wrong. Starting from honest acknowledgement of this reality—rather than maintaining collective fiction that conferences are fundamentally sound but just need minor improvements—would constitute revolutionary change in itself.
Second, transformation requires addressing the fundamental resource crisis in children's services. No amount of procedure refinement or professional development can compensate for the reality that families need concrete support—housing, income, mental health services, childcare—that systems increasingly cannot provide. Conferences that primarily offer monitoring rather than material assistance fail not because of professional inadequacy but because they're attempting impossible tasks: managing risk in contexts of deprivation whilst lacking resources to address causes of risk. Pretending better procedures will somehow overcome this resource gap serves organisational anxiety but deceives nobody with direct practice experience (MacAlister, 2022; Bywaters, 2019).
Third, organisations would need to embrace learning cultures rather than compliance cultures. This means treating mistakes as opportunities for system improvement rather than occasions for individual blame, supporting thoughtful risk-taking rather than demanding certainty, and prioritising what actually helps families over what looks good in retrospective reviews. Research on high-reliability organisations demonstrates these principles work—but implementing them requires accepting short-term vulnerability and uncertainty that current systems find intolerable (Dekker, 2012; Munro, 2019).
Fourth, practice would need to prioritise relationship quality over assessment quantity. This requires redeploying resources from extensive assessment activity towards smaller caseloads allowing sustained relationship-based work, from elaborate documentation towards direct family contact, from procedure-following towards creative problem-solving. Evidence suggests such approaches produce better outcomes—but they require abandoning familiar scripts that provide psychological comfort even whilst failing families (Forrester et al., 2018; Ruch, 2007).
Finally, transformation requires redistributing decision-making authority to match system proximity. Those with direct family knowledge should hold primary authority over practice decisions; those distant from direct contact should focus on systems-level oversight rather than individual case judgements. This inverts current arrangements in ways that challenge basic assumptions about professional hierarchy and accountability—explaining why it faces resistance despite obvious logic.
The previous section might seem optimistically naive: if evidence clearly indicates what works better, and analysis reveals why current approaches fail, why don't systems simply change? Understanding obstacles to transformation reveals how deeply embedded current patterns are and why reform efforts consistently fail to produce fundamental change.
First, current systems serve powerful psychological functions for professionals and organisations even whilst failing families and children. They provide scripts that manage anxiety, distribute blame, and create illusions of control in inherently uncertain situations. Abandoning these scripts would require professionals to tolerate uncomfortable levels of uncertainty and acknowledge limits to their authority and expertise. The psychological discomfort of genuine Adult-to-Adult engagement with families—acknowledging we don't have all answers, that parents know crucial things we don't, that outcomes remain uncertain even with best efforts—exceeds what many professionals and organisations can comfortably tolerate.
Second, transformation threatens organisational self-interest. Current systems generate extensive documentation that "proves" professionals acted appropriately if later scrutinised. They distribute responsibility across multiple agencies, ensuring nobody bears sole accountability for poor outcomes. They maintain professional boundaries that preserve status hierarchies and expert authority. Genuine alternatives—like Family Group Conferences—would require professionals to relinquish control, acknowledge family expertise, and accept greater uncertainty about outcomes. This threatens too many vested interests to happen through rational policy reform alone.
Third, the political context makes meaningful change unlikely. Transformation would require acknowledging that child protection problems stem primarily from poverty and inequality rather than individual parental inadequacy—an admission that would necessitate political action on wealth distribution, housing, social security, and community investment rather than focusing on individual family pathology (Bywaters et al., 2018). Current systems allow governments to appear concerned about children whilst avoiding politically difficult structural interventions. Why would political actors voluntarily abandon arrangements that serve their interests even whilst failing vulnerable families?
Fourth, legal frameworks constrain practice in ways that lock in current patterns. Courts expect specific types of evidence, presented in particular formats, following prescribed procedures. Professional accountability systems reward compliance over creativity. Regulatory requirements emphasise risk management over relationship building. Changing practice would require changing these legal and regulatory frameworks—but those with authority to change frameworks are precisely those most distant from direct family contact, operating within same compliance cultures that maintain current dysfunction.
Finally, workforce turnover and organisational instability create conditions where maintaining familiar patterns feels safer than attempting transformation. When half of frontline social workers have less than five years' experience, when organisational structures regularly get restructured, when services operate in permanent crisis mode, attempting fundamental change seems impossibly risky. Better to keep following established scripts—however ineffective—than risk the chaos that transformation might generate. It's organisational conservatism born from desperation rather than resistance to improvement.
These obstacles explain why decades of reform efforts—each sincerely attempting to improve practice—have produced more elaborate versions of fundamentally unchanged systems. The changes that would actually transform practice threaten too many interests, require too much uncertainty tolerance, and demand too much honesty about current failures. So systems maintain themselves through eternal reform that changes surface features whilst preserving underlying dysfunction. Rather like renovating a sinking ship: lots of activity, regular announcements of improvement, but the fundamental problem remains stubbornly unaddressed.
Given the obstacles to transformation, what might constitute realistic goals for those committed to improving practice? This essay concludes with modest proposals that acknowledge current constraints whilst suggesting incremental changes that could accumulate towards meaningful improvement—though even these face significant resistance.
At Individual Practice Level
Professionals can learn to recognise their own ego state patterns and how these invite particular family responses. Social workers who notice themselves slipping into Critical Parent can deliberately shift to Adult ego state—acknowledging difficulty of families' circumstances, expressing curiosity rather than judgement, collaborating on identifying next steps rather than prescribing solutions. Conference chairs can interrupt games when they recognise them developing, naming patterns rather than allowing them to continue. Individual professionals operating from Adult ego state create small spaces for genuine engagement even within dysfunctional systems.
At Team Level
Teams can create cultures that support thoughtful practice rather than defensive compliance. This means supervision that helps workers analyse complex situations rather than demanding certainty, team discussions that acknowledge ambiguity rather than forcing premature conclusions, and management that protects workers from organisational pressure to produce simple answers to complicated questions. Small teams with good leadership can maintain humane, effective practice even within larger dysfunctional systems—though this requires constant effort against organisational pressure to conform.
At Organisational Level
Local authorities could pilot alternatives like Family Group Conferences, systemic practice units, or proximity-matched decision-making in specific teams or areas. Evaluating these alternatives honestly—including their costs, challenges, and limitations alongside benefits—would provide evidence for whether transformation is feasible rather than remaining locked in current patterns because nobody dares try something genuinely different. Some authorities demonstrate this is possible; whether learning spreads beyond these exceptional cases remains doubtful given structural obstacles already discussed.
At Policy Level
National policy could acknowledge resource crisis honestly rather than maintaining fiction that better procedures compensate for inadequate funding. This would require admitting that child protection systems cannot effectively protect children when families lack basic resources and communities lack adequate services—politically uncomfortable but factually accurate. Whether political systems capable of producing current arrangements would voluntarily acknowledge their fundamental inadequacy seems improbable at best.
These modest proposals recognise that transforming dysfunctional systems proves extraordinarily difficult when dysfunction serves powerful interests and when acknowledging problems requires accepting uncomfortable truths about how we've organised children's services. Individual professionals and exceptional teams can create spaces for better practice. Whether this accumulates into systemic transformation or remains isolated pockets of excellence within broader dysfunction depends on factors beyond individual control: political will to adequately fund children's services, organisational capacity to tolerate uncertainty, professional willingness to examine our own contributions to dysfunction, and societal commitment to addressing poverty and inequality rather than managing their symptoms through child protection systems.
The analysis this essay provides aims not to generate despair but to support clear-eyed recognition of challenges whilst identifying what genuinely might help. Understanding why systems maintain dysfunction provides foundation for more realistic expectations about what change requires. Whether those with power to implement change will do so remains an open question—though the evidence from decades of reform efforts hardly inspires confidence. Still, maintaining illusions about current practice serves nobody's interests: not professionals caught in impossible situations, not families experiencing surveillance rather than support, and certainly not children who deserve better than systems that consume resources whilst failing to effectively protect them or support their parents. Honest analysis may not immediately generate transformation, but without it, transformation remains impossible. Which seems like sufficient reason to attempt it—even whilst acknowledging how modest the likely returns on such efforts will be.
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Topics: #TransactionalAnalysis #ChildProtection #ProfessionalPractice #SystemsThinking #MultiAgencyWorking #FamilySafeguarding #OrganisationalDynamics #YoungFamilyLife
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