Youth Futures Foundation responds to the National Youth Strategy

Introduction

England’s 2025 National Youth Strategy, Youth Matters, arrives at a time when youth policy is being asked to do several things at once:

• prevent harm
• widen participation
• rebuild local infrastructure
• support young people through increasingly complex transitions into adulthood.

The strategy’s emphasis on relationships, safe spaces and opportunity reflects much of what the evidence tells us works. Yet when these ambitions are viewed through everyday safeguarding realities, particularly for adolescents and young adults whose needs do not sit neatly within service boundaries, questions emerge about how protection is enacted, not just intended.

This article explores how safeguarding, including transitional safeguarding, is implicitly relied upon within the strategy — and where greater clarity may be needed to ensure that prevention does not drift into risk containment.

Author Isabelle King – The Safeguarding Collective

Any further details about the blog can you contact Steven Baguley at the NWG  [email protected]