The delivery of Children’s Services within the United Kingdom exists within a landscape of inherent complexity and uncertainty. Multiple agencies, policies, and professional disciplines intersect to support children and families, yet this interdependence continually tests the boundaries of trust. Practitioners must negotiate trust and mistrust across organisational, professional, and relational spaces while responding to unpredictable social, political, and institutional pressures that shape both practice and outcomes.

Proposing a framework of integrated complexity informed by Black feminist epistemology, this paper explores how Children’s Services seeking to embed anti-racism navigate the interwoven structural, relational, and ethical challenges that define their daily work. Drawing on scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, the paper considers how knowledge is situated and how lived experience, emotion, and care serve as legitimate and necessary sources of knowing. Such perspectives reveal how truth and trust are shaped by power: whose accounts are believed, whose experiences are mistrusted, and how systemic racism undermines epistemic trust between professionals and the families they serve.

The paper argues that embracing complexity through a Black feminist lens enables practitioners to confront uncertainty, cultivate reflexivity, and reimagine trust as an ethical, political, and relational practice. By valuing diverse ways of knowing and being, Children’s Services can move beyond defensive systems toward more equitable, responsive, and imaginative modes of care.

Addressing the conference theme:
This paper engages the theme by examining how trust, mistrust, and unstable truths operate within the socio-political and psychic dimensions of Children’s Services, and how Black feminist epistemology offers a way to bear that instability with care and responsibility.

Across contemporary institutional settings, emotions play a significant role in shaping participation, belonging and community, which means that individuals are increasingly expected not only to comply with behavioural norms, but also to display particular emotional orientations such as positivity, resilience and motivation. While such expectations are often framed as supportive or inclusive, they raise questions about emotional legitimacy and the consequences of emotions that fall outside accepted norms.

Building on Hochschild’s concept of feeling rules (1983), this paper examines how emotional norms operate within institutional settings and how they may contribute to the production of mistrust. Rather than approaching mistrust as a conscious stance or relational breakdown, it is conceptualised as a psychosocial process that can emerge emotionally when certain feelings are persistently disallowed.

The analysis draws on 2-year ethnographic fieldwork following children through their early encounters with schooling, treated as an exemplary institutional setting in which feeling rules are made explicit and actively normalised. Focusing on everyday situations such as classroom routines and transitions, the paper shows how children learn to regulate their emotional expressions in order to remain legitimate participants. Emotions associated with happiness and adaptability are encouraged, while anger, sadness or resistance are often redirected or silenced.

The paper argues that such processes may give rise to a form of mistrust that is internal and emotional rather than explicit or articulated. This mistrust is directed less towards others or the institution itself than towards one’s own emotional responses as reliable grounds for participation and belonging. By foregrounding the emotional and non-discursive dimensions of mistrust, the paper contributes to psychosocial debates on trust, community and emotional governance, highlighting how institutional efforts to foster cohesion and wellbeing may simultaneously produce subtle forms of exclusion.

This paper considers care experienced young people’s views of what matters in relation to their experiences of schooling and the role of teachers. It is based on a small- scale exploratory England-based pilot study involving interviews with young people with care experience and teacher educators conducted in 2022 in the years post Covid. The pandemic created and exacerbated existing challenges for care experienced pupils - especially in relation to isolation, education disruption and placement breakdown. Earlier work has noted care experienced youth’s concerns regarding the limited knowledge of practitioners and prejudice faced in school contexts. (Brodie, 2003; Hayden, 2005; Gleaves & Walker, 2008; Become, 2018). This evidenced the challenges that care experienced children and young people have about schools and educators, particularly in their feelings that teachers know little about their lives and/or that educators hold stigmatising attitudes to children in care (Haydon, 2005).

This paper explores trust and the ethics of care and ‘care-less-ness’ within institutional school contexts (Rogers, 2016; Lithari & Rogers, 2017). We argue that normative institutional ‘familialism’ frames these young people’s experiences and we ask where next for inclusive practice for care experienced pupils in schools. We outline how normative institutional ideas of family sets the scene for care experienced pupils’ isolation, before outlining examples of care-full and care-less practice that fractures and/or cemented key bonds within the young people’s accounts. Concepts of institutional ‘care’ are crucial here. Such lives were often marked by fractured and disrupted placements and institutional isolation, and yet also clearly narrated examples of ‘care-full’ practice where teachers went the extra mile. Such accounts highlight the strength of educators’ role in supporting empowering contexts for young people against the odds.

For decades, the autonomy of teachers has been eroded by political interventions that have undermined public trust in the teaching profession (Biesta, 2015). In recent years, focus has shifted to school readiness and the pressure on teachers in Nursery and Reception classes to pursue pedagogically inappropriate policies has grown. Within the educational community, there is now a deep distrust of policy makers and dissatisfaction with their quotidian impact on the lives of teachers and children.

This presentation explores the psychosocial impact of policy on the lived experience of teachers in Nursery and Reception classes. Using a theoretical framework combining ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000) and Festinger’s (2001) theory of cognitive dissonance, this narrative inquiry (Veale, 2023) used an innovative six-point data collection and analysis strategy to explore three key questions: how do Nursery and Reception class teachers conceptualise their professional practice; what factors shape their experience of practice; and what are the implications of these findings for their professional development.

Written narratives of professional practice were analysed using The Listening Guide (Gilligan, 1982). The I-Poems developed at this stage of analysis formed the stimulus for co-analytical interviews with each participant. Finally, the corpus of data was interrogated using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

The findings illustrate how political distrust compounds the liminal status of teachers working with very young children, leading to feelings of isolation, neglect, and constant conflict in their professional lives. They also suggest a need to review the way we prepare teachers for professional practice in Primary schools and how we support those moving into senior positions to become ‘educated leaders’, able to build trusting communities of practice that enhance teacher's psychic, social and political lives.