The former case of intervention is part of what is known as protection system. This requires social programmes and mechanisms that allow to respond to the needs raised, and apply preventive or protective measures that ensure the rights and well-being of children and adolescents in vulnerable or risk situations.

Taking into account these problems and the possibilities for action, the programmes and mechanisms where students would work in the future can be classified in these intervention levels:
 

• Programmes that assist minors in their natural context, avoiding separation from their families and environment, acting where they live and where these problems arise directly. Family prevention, meeting point services, Child and Youth Mental Health Centres, community intervention services and prevention of risk behaviours in the educational sphere (drug addiction, conflict mediation, sexual education, bullying).
• Programmes that involve separation from the biological family and adoption of alternative family measures, trying to take minors away from their environment on a temporary or permanent basis, and offering them an alternative family environment that ensures their development in normal conditions: family fostering and adoption.
• Programmes that involve separation from their families and internment in centres to protect minors from bigger harm or risk while the situation is solved, always trying to make this situation temporary and reinsert minors in their natural environment. Residential and fostering services, centres for non-accompanied foreign minors.

The second type of intervention includes minors in situations of social conflict who, as a consequence of their serious inability to adapt to their family and educational environment, may cause harm to themselves or to others, or may have committed an offense or crime. These situations of social difficulty in which these minors are found are defined in different ways such as minors in conflict engaged in high-risk social behaviour, with behavioural problems or maladaptive behaviour. These are the mechanisms used for intervention in these cases: residential fostering in centres for minors with behavioural problems; young offender institutions (on a closed, half-open or weekend basis) and intervention centres in child-to-parent violence.