Shining a light on risks outside the home

Over the past decade, social care organisations across the UK have committed significant time and resources to improve their response to the extra-familial risks and harms (EFRH) that young people encounter beyond their family homes. Many have developed approaches that go beyond traditional practice. Since 2019, the Innovate Project has been looking at how social care organisations are using three innovation frameworks – trauma-informed practice, contextual safeguarding or transitional safeguarding – to assist with this service redesign.

We investigated what was already known about responses to EFRH, assessing evidence from 10 countries into the nature of these responses, their intended outcomes, successes, challenges and recommendations. This enabled us to identify five key features of promising or effective social care responses to EFRH. We used these to construct a framework to inform the development of future systems and interventions which are set out in a book that is free to access digitally.