Confidential approach: agreed to return, taking control of nursery he ignored (7)
I believe the answer is:
secrecy
'confidential approach' is the definition.
The answer and definition can be both human attributes as well as being singular nouns.
Perhaps you can see a link between them that I don't see?
'agreed to return taking control of nursery he ignored' is the wordplay.
'agreed to' becomes 'yes' (I can't explain this - if you can you should believe this answer much more).
'return' says the letters should be written backwards.
'taking control of' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'nursery' becomes 'creche' (I've seen this before).
'ignored' indicates named letters should be taken away.
'yes' reversed gives 'sey'.
'creche' with 'he' taken out is 'crec'.
'sey' going around 'crec' is 'SECRECY'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for secrecy that I've seen before include "Suppression of information" , "Covert activity" , "Confidentiality" , "openly, without protection of this" , "Concealment" .)