Transitional Safeguarding

This webpage provides guidance for health and social care professionals on implementing transitional safeguarding practices, supported by legal frameworks and opportunities for further learning.

What is Transitional Safeguarding?

Transitional Safeguarding is an “approach to safeguarding adolescents and young adults fluidly across developmental stages which builds on the best available evidence, learns from both children’s and adult safeguarding practice and which prepares young people for their adult lives.” It focuses on safeguarding young people from adolescence into adulthood, recognising transition is a journey not an event, and every young person will experience this journey differently.

‘Young adults’ refers to people aged mid-teens to mid-twenties (15-24), though some flexibility is important as Transitional Safeguarding encourages a shift away from age‑determined boundaries that can be overly rigid.

Transitional Safeguarding requires changes in practice and across systems involving all agencies. Colleagues involved in safeguarding adults have a particularly important role to play and need to develop new approaches. Many local areas are already innovating and creating opportunities for more flexible support, providing valuable experiences for young adults at a key point in their lives.

Where young adults are experiencing coercion and other forms of control and exploitation under 18, these experiences and the impact they have rarely stop when a person turns 18. Young adult’s brain development continues to mature cognitively and emotionally well into their twenties. This has important implications regarding, for instance, potential ongoing coercive influence of exploiters. The transitional nature of maturation after 18 requires us to take a nuanced approach to the ‘age of maturity’ and to take account of young adults individual experiences and circumstances in how we protect their rights and understand their capacity to take particular decisions.

What Transitional Safeguarding is not:

• Transitional Safeguarding is not a set of defined activities. It does not seek to dictate practice through the use of prescribed tools, definitions of harm or methods of working.
• Transitional Safeguarding is not simply ‘transitions’ or ‘service transfer’.
• Transitional Safeguarding is not an intervention, nor a service.
• Transitional Safeguarding is not a type of harm.
• Transitional Safeguarding refers to activity that has often fallen outside of the traditional notions of both ‘transitions’ and ‘safeguarding’, where these have sometimes been interpreted through a lens of eligibility, rather than in the wider sense of human experiences and needs.

What’s helping local areas make the change

• Clear, credible, explicitly owned local leadership of the agenda.
• Expansive definition of ‘partnership’ – including communities.
• ‘A system not a service’ - A salad not a soup.
• Active knowledge and skills exchange. 
• Culture of innovation (‘the soft stuff is the hard stuff’).
• Practice informed strategy.
• Collective, place-based problem solving (rather than problem displacement).
• Building the local case – data, including people’s lived experience.

In terms of Transitional Safeguarding, this invites us to ask

• What kind of system would we create if we started with evidence rather than established norms?
• How would we use our collective resource if the explicit shared goal was to ensure best use of public money within a life-course approach?
• How do we pay attention to the connections and interdependencies, liminality and non-linearity?
• Who is responsible for the spaces between the silos?
• How do we take account of soft system factors (ethos, emotion, ego, culture)?

Research in Practice

This short animation explains what Transitional Safeguarding is.

Practice Principles

Key principles of transitional safeguarding include:
- Evidence-informed and contextual approaches.
- Person-centred and relational practice.
- Participative engagement with young people.
- Attention to equalities, diversity, and inclusion.
- Multi-agency collaboration and information sharing.

Research in Practice have just published a new briefing on Transitional Safeguarding 

“It outlines what Transitional Safeguarding is and is not as well as explaining the key principles. It is not intended to be a policy statement, nor does it detail the many ways in which local areas are experimenting and innovating in this space”.