Resilience Matrix

The resilience matrix helps practitioners organize information under four headings: resilience, vulnerability, protective environment, and adversity. It supports a resilience-based approach that focuses on strengths in a child’s world—family, community, and services—while remaining alert to risks.

Building resilience improves outcomes by creating protective networks around children. At the same time, practitioners must consider adversity and vulnerability that may threaten well-being. Both intrinsic factors (individual qualities) and extrinsic factors (family, school, community) interact to shape resilience. Below you can see an example of visual guide to Resilience Matrix.

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If you would like to learn more about Resilience Matrix, please watch the following video presented by South Lanarkshire Council.

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Interpreting the Resilience Matrix

Using Professional Judgement

• Assess how factors create protection or adversity.

• Consider how changes in adults’ lives affect children.

• Balance competing influences (e.g., removing an abuser may reduce harm but increase poverty).

Interpretation

• Infants, children and young People that appear in the top right-hand quadrant of two axes are in safe situations and bounce back from difficulties. This is the safest area for them to be.

• In the lower right quadrant are infants, children and young people who are protected, but for whatever reason are vulnerable. These children will only need specialist support if their protection is removed, but ideally universal and 2 perhaps targeted services will work to increase to resilience.

• In the top left quadrant of this graph are infants, children and young people in adverse circumstances. These are the children with whom targeted and specialist services should be working to increase the level of protection, whether by raising them from poverty or taking action to safeguard against abuse.

• Infants, children and young people in the lower left corner of the graph are the most vulnerable who do not have the resilience, personally or within their environment to protect themselves. As well as identifying the associated risk this model allows us to develop care plans in two directions – to increase the level of protection and to improve resilience, improving the chances of reducing risk.

Remember!

Resilient infants, children and young people in risky situations [the top left quadrant] may be ignored as relatively safe. It is crucial to recognise that no matter how resilient they may be, there will be times when the risks are too severe to ignore and the presence of resilience factors should never be an excuse for lack of attention or inaction.

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Download Resilience Matrix template here

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