8 - Learning from Safeguarding Adult Reviews, Serious Case Reviews, and Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews about care-experienced young people

Summary

Content warning: this chapter reports general findings from cases where young people have died from abuse and neglect.

Introduction

Although Transitional Safeguarding seeks to highlight the needs of all young people, including those for whom there are no service entitlements post-18, there are particular groups of young people whose very specific needs warrant close examination. Care-experienced young people are one such group where the state has duties, powers, and obligations after they turn 18. There is a considerable documented history which shows how these young people are failed by the support offered to them (for example, Stein 2004, 2006b). As part of our work on Transitional Safeguarding, we examined 59 Serious Case Reviews (SCRs), now called Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews (CSPRs), and Safeguarding Adult Reviews (SARs) that were written in England following the death or serious injury of care-experienced young people aged between 15 and 25. This chapter presents the rationale for this work, outlines the framework used to analyse the data and discusses the themes identified from these reviews.1 The learning from these individual reviews highlights where practice and systems need to change. Some of these themes may also apply to other young people with safeguarding needs who are not care-experienced and further research would evidence the similarities and differences.

Rationale for work

In Chapter 3 we referred to the way in which public inquiries, SCRs, and SARs have influenced public policy around safeguarding in England over the past 50 years. This effect continues with the publication of a report investigating the deaths of Star Robson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes (Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel 2022) who were both killed by caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in the UK in 2020. Both children were young and not in care and the report recommended a fundamental change in safeguarding systems for children. There is useful learning from specific cases where things have gone wrong, but there are limitations of this approach being the major factor to influence system change. During the COVID-19 lockdowns a number of teenagers and young people also died; some at the hands of their parents and carers, such as Sebastian Kalinowski (Vinter 2022).