At conference in 2016, ‘Building Resilience, Enhancing Social Support: What Research Tells Us' we examined possibilities for enhancing social support that contribute to building children and young people’s resilience. We looked at research on the role of the family; school; community; youth work, including youth participation; and social and mental health interventions.

The aims of the Conference are to promote high quality research, policy, and practice in children and young people’s issues and to provide opportunities for networking for all sectors working in this area.

There were two new aspects to this years conference we had a session focusing on resilience and social support from an international development perspective and we introduced a new format – Structured Research Dialogues. This focused on creating a solution-focused dialogue between researchers and the relevant practitioners and/or policymakers on a very specific question, such as how to support parents and families to build their children’s resilience, or how to measure and research resilience. We will be developing and perfecting these Structured Research Dialogues over the coming year by engaging more actively with policymakers and a diverse range of organisations and researcher, and we invite anyone interested in being part of this new format to get in touch with us.