Introduction

This chapter explores learning from safeguarding adults’ policy and practice, particularly from the Making Safeguarding Personal (MSP) approach. It complements Chapter 5, which focuses on learning from safeguarding children's practice, to inform our thinking about Transitional Safeguarding. It highlights how the legal and policy frameworks for safeguarding adults determine the ways in which practitioners and local systems respond to the safeguarding needs and risks faced by young adults over the age of 18. The Care Act 2014 provides the primary statutory framework for safeguarding adults and the accompanying guidance (Department of Health and Social Care 2021) describes how duties are to be delivered. The powers, as well as duties, which agencies can draw on, can enable proactive safeguarding prevention activity and work with young people who do not meet the criteria for statutory duties to make adult safeguarding enquiries leading to intervention and protection. There are also assessment duties regarding young people who may have care and support needs in the transition into adulthood. However, these are not always fully understood or delivered, often due to resource constraints (ADASS 2022).

MSP is an approach to adult safeguarding practice that prioritises the needs and outcomes identified by the person being supported and focuses on what they want to achieve to be safe (Cooper et al 2018). It is underpinned by a risk-enabling approach; enabling appropriate risk-taking in the context of becoming an adult is core to preparing for adulthood (see Chapter 7). MSP for young adults involves strength-based practice, requiring a relational partnership between the person and practitioner, where a focus on needs and deficits is counterbalanced with recognition of the resilience and assets that someone has. In this way practice can deliver a Transitional Safeguarding approach.

As described in Chapter 2, safeguarding practice still operates within a child/adult binary and neither safeguarding system currently adequately meets the needs of young people. Transitional Safeguarding advocates an approach to working with young people that is relational, developmental, and contextual; it is also participative, evidence informed, and promotes equity, equalities, diversity, and inclusion.