Why does systemic supervision support practitioners’ practice more effectively with children and families?

•Reports perspectives of 49 frontline staff from five child protective services.•Systemic supervision used as a “rehearsal space” to plan family conversations.•Family systems understood via lens of hypothesising, circularity and curiosity.•Exploring family perspectives enhanced identification of risks to children.•Systemically-trained clinicians provided supportive practice leadership. The importance of supervision for social work practice is widely accepted. This paper focuses on one type of supervision: systemic group supervision or “systemic supervision”. Systemic social work practice is generally a group-based, multi-disciplinary model of service delivery that aims to work therapeutically with the whole family. Central to this model is the use of systemically-informed group supervision. This has been shown to impact positively on the quality of direct practice with families, but what is it about this type of supervision that supports frontline practitioners to practice more skillfully? This paper is based on interviews with 49 frontline staff across five children’s services departments in the UK. It identifies the key features of systemic supervision and explores why workers think that developing shared understandings of risk to children supports them to intervene more effectively with families in contact with children’s services. These findings contribute to a growing body of knowledge about the practice shaping function of supervision within child and family social work.