Transitional Safeguarding: The revolution will be individualised

Like many other academic disciplines and professions, new discoveries and innovative forms of practice within social work do not emerge solely from the discovery of  new knowledge but can be influenced just as much by a fundamental change of perception, which transforms how social problems are observed, and what could be considered the right solution to these.

This issue is pertinent when considering Transitional Safeguarding, a modern and new approach that seeks to recontextualise how the social care system treats young people including young care leavers that transition out of adolescence to adult services. In this regard, Transitional Safeguarding is a revolutionary concept, and a significant development in social work.

Perspective plays a large part of our lives; arguably there is a tendency in most humans to view history and progress as a linear journey. The logical reasoning of those that came before is often viewed as ‘truth’ because that is how it has always been, but such beliefs are neither kind nor easy to confront. Kuhn (1962) argued that each discipline/profession/science accumulates central narratives or beliefs that come from the assumptions, biases and ideas of those that have come before that become integrated into the fabric of a profession. In the context of Social Work, these ideas or ‘paradigms’ fundamentally shift and set how members of the profession understand social issues and the solutions that are proposed to fix them. The point made in a near 60-year-old book on scientific progress carries some pertinent lessons for Social Work as a new profession, and to the idea of Transitional Safeguarding. 

Safeguarding systems in the United Kingdom have been governed and set by intuition and beliefs concerning the age of majority that need to be revisited, understood within their social context and challenged. They are not ‘truth’. For example, why is the age of majority and maturity considered to be 18 years old? It relies on the idea and intuition that prior to 18 children and young people should be considered as incapable of managing their affairs, but at 18 it is expected for a young person to cope for themselves. The outcome of this belief and perspective on the differing capacities of young people pre/post 18 are binary care and safeguarding systems that operate separately from each other, and young people are expected to fit these systems. Just as belief and perception is the source of much consternation, a fundamental shift in perspective and discourse, a revolution that challenges long established ideas, can be necessary for Social Work as a profession to remain vibrant and challenge long lasting social issues to create good outcomes for young people facing adversity. I want to consider the potential impact of Transitional Safeguarding in two ways: firstly by exploring the evidence base that shows how the prevailing ideas that govern the care system are outdated; and secondly by recounting my own experiences and perspective as a young person transitioning to adulthood that convince me that change is necessary.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) provided a framework for understanding how professions and disciplines can lose touch with reality, how ‘a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class’ can limit innovation and change. The idea that our brains continue to develop post 18, and much further into our twenties is not a dramatic new idea, it has been proposed for over a decade by neuroscientists and other researchers (Prior et al., 2011; Sawyer et al., 2018). Therefore, from an evidence perspective, the current system of safeguarding needs to be challenged as its framework has been shaped by beliefs that are now outdated as opposed to best practice. Indeed, such systems may undermine the capacities of those who are most vulnerable; care leavers that may face a ‘cliff edge’ in the services that they can access, and may be shunted out of the support services that they have had around them since being a child. Transitional Safeguarding provides a revolutionary shift in practice that encourages continued engagement with young people pre and post-18, and structuring safeguarding practices to the individual developmental needs of the child as opposed to an arbitrary age of independence. 

One of the primary arguments of Transitional Safeguarding is how fluid the boundary is between adolescence and adulthood, According to the United Nations, a young person is between the ages of 15-24. I myself have just recently transitioned from a young person to an adult, and was fortunate to not face many external obstacles throughout my life. I look back on my mentality and conduct when I was 18 years old and find it amusing that at that age I was considered an adult. I feel like I developed more as a person between the ages of 18-25 compared to 11-18.

Transitional Safeguarding is significant to me because it fundamentally shifted my own perception about how dominant paradigms governing social work guided how I considered social problems and their potential solutions. And I believe as a new social worker entering the profession and hoping to make my mark, that Transitional Safeguarding’s greatest promise is in its potential for social workers to understand how entrenched practices and structures they operate within might need updating to truly be socially just.

Transitional Safeguarding can empower us to change the perspective of ourselves from a system functionary to a system reformer, and can empower us to craft social institutions that positively benefit society and truly allow social workers to live up to their mission.