3 - Negotiating legal and social policy frameworks

Summary

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the legal and social policy frameworks that govern safeguarding practices for children and adults in England. It explores some of the drivers as well as implications of these frameworks. As we set out in the Introduction and Chapter 2, safeguarding practices use a binary notion of childhood and adulthood (Holmes and Smale 2018). This binary approach within safeguarding is in part driven by increasingly divergent social care policies and practices which operationalise the different legislative, policy, and conceptual frameworks for children and adults. Ultimately, this perpetuates the gaps through which some young people fall. These are outlined and explored later.

We also identify the key principles that underpin safeguarding practice with children and with adults. Many of the principles underpinning child and adult safeguarding are similar, but there are also some differences and these are outlined and discussed. This is further explored in Chapters 5 and 6, which examine learning from innovation and promising practice in children's and adults’ safeguarding, respectively. Importantly, neither safeguarding system is specifically designed with adolescent developmental needs or behaviours in mind. Legal and social policy frameworks provide the architecture for safeguarding practice, and they can promote or inhibit ways of working. This chapter explores the implications for developing Transitional Safeguarding.

An overview of safeguarding in children's and adult social services in England

Safeguarding practices in children's and adult social services in England have developed in accordance with different legislative, policy, and conceptual frameworks. The Local Authority Social Services Act 1970 led to the creation of social services departments and established the framework for local authority social work that is still in place today (Carr and Goosey 2017). However, the legal frameworks and statutory guidance development for safeguarding of children and adults are completely separate.

Children's safeguarding and the role of child death inquiries

The first Act of Parliament for the prevention of cruelty to children was passed in 1889 (Batty 2005). In the following 100 years, until the Children Act 1989, further legislation that specifically addressed child protection across the UK included: Children Act 1908; Children and Young Persons Act 1932; and the Children Act 1948.