Transitions from children’s to adults’ social care support

What were the aims of the exercise?

We wanted to learn more about the uncertainties and challenges around the transition from children’s to adults’ social care support.

It’s a time when young people often face a change in setting or in the individuals they’ve had supporting them. They may have more difficulty accessing support or the support they’ve known as children comes to an end.

We aimed to get a broad understanding of what research is needed around transitions and the challenges connected with them. We wanted to engage with children, young people and younger adults accessing care and support, their families and carers. We also talked to people working in social care and other colleagues in sectors like health, education and the justice system.

We wanted to find out what barriers, problems and uncertainties young people face as part of transitions from children’s to adults’ social care. 

The exercise aimed to identify research questions that address a gap in evidence and knowledge around transitions. This will drive research that will contribute to better care and support for young people and their families and carers.

How we carried out the exercise

We used different methods to gather people’s views on transitions and look for gaps in knowledge and research like surveys, focus groups, workshops and facilitated meetings.

We collected the questions about transitions our stakeholder groups told us were important to them and at the final stage of the exercise, we pulled people together in a workshop to agree the top 10 priority questions for research on this topic.

Who helped us carry out this work?

We set up a working group of subject experts including practitioners from adult and children’s social care, social workers, researchers and mental health professionals to help us shape and guide the research.

The working group met regularly and reviewed and shaped progress along each step of the priority-setting exercise.

The outcomes: the 'top 10'

At the end of the process we arrived at a ‘top 10’ of research priorities to explore questions around transitions that haven’t been answered by existing research. 

The questions people with lived experience and practitioners voted as the most important can be found on the page: Top 10 research priorities: transitions from children’s to adults’ social care.