Improving support for young people transitioning into adult social care 

Last updated: 4 February 2025

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ADASS President, Melanie Williams, discusses improving young people’s transition into adult social care. 

As ‘corporate parents’ in local councils, we aim to create the conditions for all our children and young people to successfully grow into adults. This means access to education and skills, decent homes and good incomes. It’s particularly important for our young people with special educational needs (SEND), mental illness, autism, or disability who need support.  

The Care Act is a great piece of legislation and reminds us of the need to identify children and young people who may have eligible social care needs and to plan for their transition. Given our duties to promote wellbeing and prevent social care need, our nirvana is to prepare our young people for a thriving and independent adulthood, and if possible, avoid the need for adult social care at all.  

Most councils have strong, dedicated teams that work between adult and children’s social care, with principles of social justice and person-centred practice at their heart. On many occasions we support people well at different stages of their life course.   

However, too often we hear from parents and adults that they fall between systems, that information and advice is not available at the right time and support can feel hard to navigate.   

The challenges facing local councils  

Children’s Social Care, Adult Social Care and Special Educational Needs are three systems that are core to our civic society and social justice. These three key services are the biggest areas of spend in upper tier local authorities. In councils, we are facing many challenges that can get in the way of us supporting our residents – an ever tightening of resources, rapidly increasing costs of social care placements, and an overloaded system for Education Care Health Plans (ECHPs). All three systems have been promised reform for years, and whilst we see some green shoots, the reform we need feels out of reach.  

Improvements to support young people  

We’ve started to build a picture of practical actions and solutions in a recent report ‘Preparing for Adulthood’ we’ve produced with IMPOWER, informed by discussions with parents of young people who’ve experienced the system and a range of professionals.  

There’s more we can do to improve our practice, such as using the data and insight we have about children and young people in our care more effectively.  Local authority boundaries, areas defined by Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and school catchments often don’t align, making it difficult to coordinate support. Creating a shared sense of ‘place’, where all agencies involved in a young person’s life operate within consistent geographical boundaries, would foster better collaboration and improve service delivery.  

There are also areas that that we can’t solve alone in our councils that need cross Government working. Children’s and adults’ services operate within different legislative frameworks. We can do more to span the two perspectives – risk management for children and risk enablement for adults – yet we need alignment in key areas to make that work. Most significant is the age of transition across our legislative landscape and with our health partners. These vary so differently.  

The financial cost 

I mentioned costs. Elsewhere, colleagues have drawn attention to the insufficiency and cost dilemma facing Directors of Children’s Services in supporting young people on the brink of adulthood close to home. As well as modelling this cost into adulthood, the County Council Network report ‘The forgotten story of social care’ found that the costs of care for working age adults could reach £17bn by 2030.    

A large part of this is the cost of supporting young adults with educational needs requiring support, a group we all too often see in adult services in crisis and often needing intensive healthcare before their adult social care support.   

We need to act and need support from Government to do so. Faced with the prospect of us not seeing reform for some years, where does this leave us?  

The need for a holistic approach  

Too often, services focus on immediate needs, overlooking the long-term outcomes that will define a young person’s future.  As leaders, we need to take a more holistic, ‘whole life course’ approach that incorporates the whole person, life course, family, and community which prepares young people not just for the next few years, but for the rest of their lives. This involves planning for ongoing personal development, employment, health, and social relationships, as well as continuously adapting support as their needs evolve. Thinking long-term helps ensure that young people have the skills, networks, and resilience to navigate adult life successfully and independently, reducing the risk of crises later.  

I know there are solutions within our reach and there are already many great examples of local councils developing creative approaches to support young people in their areas. We need to bring those examples together to create a blueprint for a successful transition, so we can ensure all our young people can move into adulthood with confidence, dignity, and the right support in place to help them thrive.  

Want to learn more about the solutions in the ADASS/IMPOWER: Preparing for adulthood report ?

  

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