Complex Safeguarding: The role of innovation to address risks facing young adults

Our impact

The government has invested over £200m in innovation in children’s social care over the last 5 years. What do we know about how innovation in social care actually happens and how does it benefit children and families? This research project asks: how does innovation around complex safeguarding risks for adolescents grow, develop and create impact?

Alongside our partners at the University of Sussex, University of Bedfordshire and Research in Practice, the project focused on three approaches to working with adolescents facing complex risk: trauma-informed practice, contextual safeguarding and transitional safeguarding (young people moving from the children’s system to the different world of adult safeguarding).

The approach

Innovation Unit’s role was to bring innovation expertise and evidence in how innovation in social care develops, flourishes and scales – both on the ground and at a national level.

The first year of the project focused on reviewing and synthesising existing knowledge and literature on the ways in which innovation in social care can lead to improved, cost-effective outcomes, and the factors and processes which facilitate new ways of working being developed, embedded, scaled and sustained in local systems. The second year consisted of field research with six local authority systems working with adolescents who were putting these approaches into practice.