Transitions: Transitional safeguarding

Written by Dr Grace Krause and edited by Dr Kat Deerfield and Dr Flossie Caerwynt

Summary

In this evidence summary, we highlight current research and evidence on transitional safeguarding and what it means for social care practice.

The research shows that young people's support needs do not disappear when they turn 18. The effects of childhood trauma can continue into adulthood, and some forms of harm may intensify during adolescence.

We explore how transitional safeguarding challenges traditional distinctions between children's and adults' services, recognises the different contexts in which harm can occur, and considers how best to support young people who may be involved in criminal activity.

We also examine the challenges social care workers can face when carrying out transitional safeguarding, including the emotional impact of the work, pressures related to workload and working conditions, and organisational structures that can make this approach more difficult to deliver.

Introduction

Transitions from childhood to adulthood can be a challenging time for all young people. For young people where there are safeguarding concerns, from either within or outside the family, the transition into adulthood comes with particular dangers and challenges.

This evidence summary explores the concept of transitional safeguarding. We look at what makes transitional safeguarding complex, and what can help support social care workers to do this work.

A person looking at their phone while sitting up in bed

Transitional safeguarding is a term used to describe safeguarding efforts that focus on young people as they transition into adulthood.

Key concepts

Transitional safeguarding is a term used to describe safeguarding efforts that focus on young people as they transition into adulthood. This is different from approaches that focus on just children or just adults. Advocates of transitional safeguarding argue that social care is sometimes structured as a binary, where someone is seen as either a child or an adult. But this does not always serve vulnerable young people well (Holmes and Cooper, 2025). Young people can face complex and interconnected harms during their transition to adulthood. Holmes and Cooper (2025) argue that addressing these harms needs an integrated approach that can support mental and physical health needs while also responding to contextual factors. These factors can include family dynamics, education, social environments, and structural disadvantages such as poverty, racism, and involvement in the criminal justice system.

Firmin (2024) argues that child protection services are often based on individualism, and this makes it harder to understand how young people can be safeguarded. She argues that within these individualist rules parents are seen as responsible for their children’s well-being. And that the state only steps in when the parents fall short of their responsibility. She also argues that child protection services focus on changing the behaviour of parents and children. When it comes to children or young people facing complex harms outside of their family, these systems fall short. Instead of focusing on changing the individual behaviours of young people or their families, transitional safeguarding has a more holistic focus. This looks at the personal and environmental factors that young people need to be safe.

There are different ways that people do transitional safeguarding. Some researchers argue that transitional safeguarding should not be based on one top-down idea of how to do things. Instead, they argue it should take local contexts into account and be shaped by the experiences of individual young people (see Cocker et al., 2021; Ruch et al., 2024).

Holmes and Cooper (2025) have suggested six principles that define transitional safeguarding:

Evidence-informed: using research and experiences from practitioners and people accessing care to shape and support safeguarding practices
Contextual or ecological perspective: focusing on the different environments young people move in and aiming to make all of these safe, instead of focusing only on individuals
Transitional or developmental in design: Looking at young people’s needs holistically to make it appropriate to the different needs they may have at different stages of development
Relational ethos: approaches focus on strengthening relationships. This means they should be person-centred and trauma-informed, as well as empowering young people to build capacity. It also means using inclusive and respectful language and avoiding being stigmatising or victim-blaming
Attentive to issues of equity, equality and inclusion: addressing structural issues and discrimination when it affects young people and being proactively anti-oppressive
Participative in every level: making support strength-based and enabling young people to make choices over their own life and co-designing services.

Huegler et al. (2025) emphasise that transitional safeguarding has to be seen in a wider context. They note that to make sure that young people in crisis can receive the support they need to live full and flourishing lives, wider change is needed – what they call “boundary spanning whole-systems change” (Huegler et al., 2025). This means improving integration of the services young people access as well as listening closely to how young people make sense of their own well-being and the lives they want to live.

There are different ways that people do transitional safeguarding.

Policy and guidance

Youth Justice Blueprint for Wales (Welsh Government, 2019)

The Youth Justice Blueprint for Wales produced by the Welsh Government Ministry of Justice sets out the goal of preventing children in Wales from entering the criminal justice system. To do this the blueprint lays out plans to “Develop a youth justice system which treats children with fairness and respect and helps them to build on their strengths and to make positive changes and choices in their lives. Support children to live crime free, positive and healthy lives, improving well-being and making communities safer”. The plan proposes to do this through taking a “children first” approach where the focus is put on meeting the individual needs of a child that has come in contact with the criminal justice system.

The Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014

Both children’s and adult’s safeguarding procedures are outlined in the Social S ervices and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014. All well-being procedures are focused on being person-centred and allowing different organisations to work together to put the interests of the person first. The big difference between adult and child safeguarding regulations in the Act is that it gives guidance on safeguarding all children. However, for a safeguarding concern to become relevant within the Act for an adult, other social care needs will also be required.

The principles of safeguarding for adults and children is outlined on the Safeguarding Wales website which gives an overview of the relevant guidelines.

Transitional safeguarding invites us to think more about the complexities of things.

What makes transitional safeguarding so complex?

Research into transitional safeguarding picks up several tensions when it comes to supporting young people to be safe. Huegler and Ruch (2022) argue that one thing that makes transitional safeguarding so challenging is that we often think about things in terms of binaries that are unhelpful. For example, we distinguish between adults and children or between victims and perpetrators of crimes because it helps us make sense of the world. But sometimes these things aren’t clearly separate. Transitional safeguarding often deals with young people who are in between these categories, which means it can be hard for them to get the support they need.

In the following sections, we look specifically at:

distinctions between children and adult services
balancing rights and safety
supporting young people involved with the criminal justice system.

We explore some of what research has found about young people in these circumstances, and how transitional safeguarding invites us to think more about the complexities of things.

Children’s and adults’ services

Transitional safeguarding suggests that just because young people turn 18 and therefore are no longer officially children, their needs don’t become less urgent. But, their ability to access the right kind of support often becomes much more limited (Holmes and Smale, 2018). On the one hand, there tends to be much less support available as young people enter adult services (Codd and Hewitt, 2021; Broad et al., 2017; Beynon et al., 2022) On the other hand, the way that safeguarding works for children or adults has considerable differences which we discuss in this evidence summary.

One of the issues that makes transitional safeguarding tricky is that the rules about what information can be shared, and who gets to make decisions about a young person’s life changes when they turn 18. Children’s safeguarding focuses on protecting all children from harm, while adult safeguarding is often understood to be more about safeguarding adults who have other social care needs. But, this may lead to young people’s support being stopped when they’re 18, even though there are still safeguarding concerns. The authors of the UK Government briefing on transitional safeguarding (Research in Practice, 2021) emphasise that if councils stop support at 18 when there are still safeguarding concerns, this is a misunderstanding of the duties of councils. They argue that since it’s impossible for anyone to consent to be abused, safeguarding practices should continue beyond the age of 18, where there’s concern about abuse.

Huegler et al. (2025) researched transitional safeguarding meetings. They noted that even though the panel’s remit was to support young people up to the age of 25, young people over 18 received significantly less attention from professionals. For example, the researchers noted that in one case professionals discussed concerns around a peer group of people between 14-18. They didn’t mention the 18 year old of the group at all, despite the fact that his name had been on the meeting agenda. When researchers shared this observation with the professionals in the meeting they were surprised. The professionals also pointed out the fact that they saw the younger teenagers in this group as particularly vulnerable to harms.

It’s important to understand adolescence as a distinctive age.

Understanding adolescence as a distinct phase

Research also suggests that it’s important to understand adolescence as a distinctive age. And that it’s fundamentally different from both childhood and adulthood in terms of the risks people may face. Some research suggests that some harms actually become more severe as young people turn 18 (Sawyer et al., 2018).

Holmes and Smale (2018) also point towards evidence that many of the issues that may bring a child into contact with safeguarding will have effects on them that last into adulthood. Some research suggests that childhood neglect is linked to later drug use or offending behaviour in adolescence and adulthood (Brandon et al., 2014; Kotch et al., 2008). Poverty and deprivation in childhood often continue into adulthood making young people particularly vulnerable to sexual and criminal exploitation (Wilson and Butler, 2014).

Young people can face specific interconnected harms such as sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, neglect, homelessness, poor mental health, self-harm, substance misuse, and criminal exploitation (Hanson and Holmes, 2014). Traditional safeguarding for children tends to focus on harms that happen inside of families and on the behaviour of parents and carers. Transitional safeguarding approaches recognise that as children get older, they’re also at increased risk of harms that happen outside of their homes and families. (Holmes and Smale, 2018). All this leads to a need to rethink the boundary between childhood and adulthood as a clear dividing line.

Victims and perpetrators

The distinction between children and adult services can be particularly harsh when it comes to young people in relation to the criminal justice system. For people under 18, the Youth Blueprint for Wales (Welsh Government, 2019) sets out a specific approach. It focuses on understanding the traumatic experiences and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that often leads to children becoming involved in criminal activity. This approach leads to an understanding of children in the criminal justice system needing person centred support that focuses on their individual needs.

Transitional safeguarding suggests that young people’s involvement in stigmatised or criminalised behaviour should more often be understood as a safeguarding issue. Holmes and Smale (2018) suggest that sometimes, when young people engage in risky behaviour or have harmful experiences these can be seen as “lifestyle choices” that the young people have freely chosen to engage in. But, behaviours such as involvement in criminal activity, sexual behaviour deemed age inappropriate or harmful or other risky behaviours can often be an indicator of the young person experiencing abuse or exploitation (Holmes and Smale, 2018). Young people who get involved in criminalised activities often face complex dynamics. They can end up in situations where they're being exploited and also being manipulated into causing harm to others. Young people who are autistic or who are struggling with substance misuse or poor mental health can be particularly vulnerable to those dynamics (Research in Practice, 2021).

Research on child criminal exploitation in Wales (Maxwell and Wallace, 2021; Maxwell, 2026) suggests that children and young people who are being pressured and manipulated into criminal activity often do not present to services as “stereotypical victims”. This can lead to vulnerable young people to be seen only as perpetrators who cause harm to others, rather than as victims of exploitation who are experiencing harm themselves.

Maxwell and Wallace (2021) also report professionals voicing concerns if young adults who had been criminally exploited as children were able to make informed choices. Criminal exploitation of children often involves different forms of grooming and indoctrination, and the effects of this don’t automatically stop when someone turns 18.

Working in transitional safeguarding can be very distressing.

Supporting workers to do transitional safeguarding

Transitional safeguarding is a complex field to work in, and people doing this work face many challenges. But research shows there are a number of things that can help. In the following sections, we explore what research says can support workers to do transitional safeguarding. We look specifically at:

support with the complex and distressing nature of the work
the role of organisational structures
the importance of professional curiosity and how this can be supported in the workplace.

Support with emotionally complex work

Being able to reflect on your work and your own emotions has an important role in helping people deal with complex and distressing situations. We explored the importance of reflection in our evidence summary on communicating with families in difficult situations. In that evidence summary, we described Ferguson’s (2016) research on why family social workers sometimes don’t notice harm in stressful situations. Ferguson argues that when social workers experience extreme emotions at work they can engage in “non-reflexive” actions.

“Non-reflexive actions” are when people do things without thinking about what they’re doing. This can make it hard for workers to understand why they do things a certain way. It can even mean they do things that they know are not in line with good practice without realising it. Ferguson suggests that managers need to create safe spaces for social workers to explore their feelings and plan their family visits to make sure they don’t disengage from difficult situations (2016).

Similarly, Ruch et al. (2024) describe how social workers or other social care workers working with young people facing difficult situations can experience extreme distress and anxiety in their work. These researchers find that it’s important for organisations to acknowledge this and make space for workers to process these emotions. They argue that if ignored, these extreme emotions can lead to social workers entering a state of mind where they’re only able to think in terms of very simple binaries. Binaries in this context are when we think that there are only two clearly defined groups, such as adults/children or victims/perpetrators. Ruch et al. (2024) argue that for successful transitional safeguarding, it’s important for professionals to understand complexities beyond binary positions. They argue that extreme distress makes it harder for social workers to acknowledge these complexities.

Supporting young people in crisis

Working in transitional safeguarding can be very distressing. A research project looking at two transitional safeguarding teams in England found that working with young people in extreme crisis was often unpredictable and emotionally intense. Participants talked particularly about the difficulties of working with young people who went “missing” and young people who were under threats of violence or whose lives were at risk (Huegler et al., 2025).

Similarly, the social workers interviewed by Ruch et al. (2024) described the work they did as being “life and death”. They sometimes expressed the feeling that their tasks were impossibly difficult because the young people they were working with were in so much danger (Ruch et al., 2024). Huegler et al. (2025) note that the extreme risks involved in transitional safeguarding can make it feel more difficult for professionals to focus on person-centred care. It can be especially hard for workers to acknowledge the long-term complex needs someone might have. People working in this area have high workloads, which may mean that they have to prioritise immediate safeguarding concerns over long-term needs. The researchers also report that these workers were worried that they may be blamed personally when things go wrong.

Ruch et al. (2024) looked at the potential of reflective groups to support practice. They argue that part of what makes transitional safeguarding work possible is making space for professionals to reflect on their work and receive support. Participants in the study said that reflective groups were important to help them reflect and feel a stronger connection with other workers and the young people they supported. Sharing their frustrations and worries in the groups helped them feel recognised in their struggles (Ruch et al., 2024). They also said that these groups gave them space to think critically about their own work, which helped them to understand the complexities of this work. The researchers suggest that supporting spaces like these for people working in transitional safeguarding can help them navigate the complexities of their roles (Ruch et al. 2024).

The social workers in the study said that broader systems were often unsupportive to young people.

Organisational structures

Research on transitional safeguarding shows that sometimes the organisational structures around safeguarding procedures make it hard for social care workers to support safeguarding.

Sometimes, social care workers report that the structures they work within make it harder for them to support young people in the way that they would like. Huegler et al. (2025) identify that things are made more difficult by cuts to public funding, as well as a culture where individual social care workers are blamed when things go wrong.

Some social workers interviewed about working in transitional safeguarding by Ruch et al. (2024) talked about the difficulties of working in environments that did not support their values. They described having a strong desire to work in a way that was guided by their relationships with the young people they supported. But they said they found this difficult within the ways their organisations currently worked. The social workers in the study said that broader systems were often unsupportive to young people. They also said that even when organisations were saying they were implementing positive changes, this often mostly meant changing language and asking for more data . People talked about having to prioritise the relationships with the young people they were supporting over administrative duties (Ruch et al., 2024).

Data from Social Care Wales’s 2025 workfor ce survey also shows difficulties around working conditions in the social care sector. When we asked social workers in Wales what their main source of stress was, nearly half named administrative duties as something that caused them stress. About half said excessive workloads were causing them stress, and 18 per cent said they did not always feel safe at work. People working in social care reported higher anxiety levels than the general population, with almost half of social workers reporting that high workload was their main source of stress (Krause et al., 2026).

It’s not always clear how best to keep young people safe when they're facing complex challenges. And those who are supporting them often have to work in contexts where they have insufficient funding and support. Research suggest that better funding for services and better conditions for social care workers are needed. Without these improvements, it’s hard for people working in transitional safeguarding to give young people the time and attention they need (Ruch et al., 2024).

Conclusions

Safeguarding procedures have traditionally struggled to account for the challenges young people face as they transition from children to adults. Transitional safeguarding aims to address these gaps in provision by developing new approaches to support young people.

In this evidence summary we've looked at research that explores how social care workers can better understand the complex situations that young people facing harm often find themselves in. We've also outlined research on what can support social care workers to be able to engage with complexities within safeguarding procedures.

Additional reading

Ruch, G., Damman, J., Huegler, N. and Bowyer, S. (2024) ‘I was detecting a kind of, a from the heart kind of dialogue’: understanding the role of reflective spaces for transitional safeguarding innovation’, Journal of Social Work Practice, 38 (2), pp. 175-190, doi:10.1080/02650533.2024.2327046, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2024.2327046.
Huegler, N., Damman, J. L., Ruch, G. and Bowyer, S. (2025) ‘”We were persistently othering them out”: Reconceptualising ‘safeguarding’ for young people experiencing extra-familial risks and harms during transition to adulthood’, Health Education Journal, 84 (4), pp. 432-445, doi:10.1177/00178969241299338, available at https://doi.org/10.1177/00178969241299338.
Firmin, C. (2024) ‘Binaries and Blurred Lines: The Ethical Stress of Child Protection Social Work in the Grey of Extra-Familial Harm’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 18 (4), pp. 404-421, doi:10.1080/17496535.2024.2414963, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2024.2414963.
Maxwell, N., Wallace, C. (2021) Child Criminal Exploitation in Wales, available at https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/145780/ (accessed 26 January 2026).
Holmes, D. and Smale, E. (2018) Transitional safeguarding - adolescence to adulthood, available at https://www.researchinpractice.org.uk/all/publications/2018/august/transitional-safeguarding-adolescence-to-adulthood-strategic-briefing-2018/ (accessed: 6 August 2026).

References - click to expand

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