The Trusted Adult Guarantee
By Jack Reynolds
This article is part of series of guest posts written by colleagues across the children’s workforce to mark the launch of the Centre. This piece is written by Jack Reynolds, Chief Executive of the Football Beyond Borders.
The Government’s 10 Year Youth Strategy put increasing the number of young people with a trusted adult as its number one priority. This followed the ‘Lost Boys Taskforce’ call for a ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’. Through my twin role on the Taskforce and as Chief Executive at Football Beyond Borders, I was lead author for the ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’ proposal - a costed plan to ensure that the UK becomes the first country in the world where every young person has at least one trusted adult by their side throughout their teenage years.
The ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’ was based on four assumptions. First, that the number and quality of a young person’s relationships is the strongest indicator of current functioning and long-term success. Second, that we are failing to provide long-term, consistent relationships for our children and young people. Third, that a focus on short-term, fragmented interventions has failed to drive national-level improvements in attainment, employment, mental health, and attendance for vulnerable students. And finally, that within the current political and economic context, there is unlikely to be a significant increase in overall investment in the children’s workforce.
The ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’ shares many of the aims of the Centre for the Children’s Workforce. In particular, I see it as a powerful mechanism for reducing fragmentation and reorganising child-focused systems around the child rather than around services, roles, or institutions.
Firstly, the language of being a trusted adult unifies the fundamental role that, at some level, any professional or volunteer working with young people shares. I use the YoungMinds / UK Youth youth-led definition of a trusted adult as someone who:
“is chosen by the young person as a safe figure that listens without judgment, agenda or expectation, but with the sole purpose of supporting and encouraging positivity within a young person’s life.”
It is undoubtedly true that different roles across the children’s workforce come with very different levels of time, expectations, and training to play this role. However, it is also true that everyone working with children and young people should have both the desire and the ability to be a safe figure who listens to young people as part of their role.
Just as ‘Every Child Matters’ created a shared statutory language and set of expectations across education, youth work, sport, and health, the ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’ works to provide a shared relational language and a set of minimum relational standards across the children’s workforce.
Secondly, the language of trusted adults aims to drive closer links between those working with young people in schools and those working with young people in the community. I work as both a school-based counsellor and a community-based football coach, and I am consistently struck by how difficult it is for adults working with the same young people on either side of this school–community divide to think about overlaps, relationships, or shared responsibility.
Research from the Youth Endowment Fund shows that the majority of young people (58%) cite school staff as their most trusted adults. However, among boys in particular, sports coaches play a significant role, with 24% saying their coach is their trusted adult. This suggests that for around one in four teenage boys, a sports coach may be the key to unlocking motivation, engagement, and drive at school.
Most secondary schools now recognise parents as key partners in improving outcomes and invest time and resources in engaging them. Yet, given the importance of adult role models outside the family during adolescence, the lack of systematic engagement with trusted adults in the community remains an overlooked driver of better outcomes for young people.
In this way, the ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’ reframes schools not as the sole locus of responsibility, but as anchors within a wider relational workforce that includes coaches, youth workers, mentors, and volunteers.
Thirdly, the ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’ moves the system towards one where the quality of the relationship becomes more significant than professional role or title. This reflects how young people experience the world: they care that somebody cares for them, not whether that person trained as a teacher, a youth worker, or a football coach.
In such a system, the first question before any intervention would be: “Who is this young person’s trusted adult?” Not because trusted adults are a solution to every problem, but because without trust, no intervention works as intended.
Given the complexity of need and intensity of support required by the most vulnerable young people, the ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’ does not replace highly skilled professional roles or specialist interventions. Instead, it provides a relational through-line that allows those roles and interventions to work together rather than in siloes or at cross-purposes. At their best, a trusted adult is the interpreter between services, the continuity across transitions, the holder of context, and the person able to persuade young people to engage meaningfully with specialist support.
In a system of rising need, stretched budgets, and fragmented services, the ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’ offers a way to move beyond incremental reform toward a truly joined-up children’s workforce. By providing a shared relational language and minimum standards, it connects professionals across settings around the lived experience of the child. Just as safeguarding unified a fragmented system around a statutory duty, the ‘Trusted Adult Guarantee’ unifies it around relationships, enabling the workforce to work more coherently and ensuring every young person has a trusted adult by their side.
