Transitional Safeguarding in youth justice and probation services: A scoping studyBy HM Inspectorate of Probation

Transitional Safeguarding is defined as: ‘An approach to safeguarding adolescents and young adults fluidly across developmental stages which builds on the best available evidence, learns from both children’s and adult safeguarding practice, and which prepares young people for their adult lives’ (Holmes and Smale, 2018, p3). This approach and the service transition from youth justice to probation are not one and the same. The transition from youth justice to probation is a process of moving or transferring between two systems at the age of 18, while the transition to adulthood is not a one-off discrete event but happens in different spaces and with different temporal boundaries according to the individual experience. Transitional Safeguarding is an approach that recognises the liminality and reality of the older adolescent/young adult period, namely safeguarding young people across the threshold of 18 years. The approach pays attention to the barriers and inequalities experienced at this stage of development (Cocker et al., 2024). To date, there has been no research explicitly exploring how Transitional Safeguarding is understood and applied within the youth justice and probation service context to support young people aged between mid-teens to mid-twenties. Holmes and Smith (2022) authored the Academic Insights paper 2022/03, providing suggestions on the potential application of Transitional Safeguarding within justice services. This study provides an overview of how youth justice and probation embed the six key principles of Transitional Safeguarding into their service design. These principles are that any Transitional Safeguarding approach must be: • evidence-informed • contextual/ecological • transitional/developmental • relational • attentive to equity, equalities, diversity, inclusion (EEDI) • participative.

Research & Analysis Bulletin 2025/02

Manchester, UK: 2025. 48p.