Coursework Sample: Critical Analysis of a UK Safeguarding Policy

Model Answer

Introduction

Adult safeguarding in England was placed on a statutory footing for the first time by the Care Act 2014, which requires local authorities to make, or cause to be made, enquiries where an adult with care and support needs is, or is at risk of, abuse or neglect (Care Act 2014, s.42). Alongside this legislative change, the Making Safeguarding Personal (MSP) initiative sought to move practice away from a procedurally driven, investigation-led model and towards one centred on the outcomes that the adult themselves wishes to achieve (Local Government Association and Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, 2019).

This coursework critically analyses the safeguarding policy framework operating within an English local authority, structured around the Care Act’s six safeguarding principles, and evaluates the extent to which the framework achieves its stated aim of protecting adults at risk while respecting autonomy and choice. The analysis proceeds in four stages: first, it situates the policy within its legislative and guidance context; second, it critically examines the six principles individually; third, it applies the framework to an anonymised practice scenario to expose tensions between policy intent and operational reality; and finally, it evaluates the framework against person-centred and strengths-based models of care before offering recommendations for practice improvement.

The stakes attached to getting this policy translation right are considerable. NHS Digital’s annual safeguarding adults collection consistently records tens of thousands of concluded section 42 enquiries each year across England, with neglect and acts of omission, physical abuse, and financial or material abuse forming the largest categories of confirmed risk. Behind each of these figures sits an individual whose experience of the safeguarding system is shaped not primarily by the wording of the Care Act itself, but by how consistently local policy translates that wording into timely, proportionate and empowering practice. A policy that reads well in a board report but is not resourced or embedded operationally therefore represents more than an administrative shortfall; it represents a live risk to some of the most structurally vulnerable adults a local authority serves.

Policy Context and Legislative Framework

The Care Act 2014 consolidated a fragmented body of adult social care law and, crucially, ended reliance on the non-statutory No Secrets guidance that had governed safeguarding practice since 2000 (Department of Health and Social Care, 2018). Section 42 creates a duty on local authorities to make enquiries where they have reasonable cause to suspect that an adult in their area has needs for care and support, is experiencing or at risk of abuse or neglect, and is unable to protect themselves because of those needs. This statutory duty is supported by the establishment of Safeguarding Adults Boards under section 43, which bring together the local authority, the integrated care board and the police as core statutory partners, and by the requirement under section 44 to commission a Safeguarding Adult Review where a case meets defined seriousness criteria.

The statutory guidance accompanying the Act identifies six safeguarding principles — empowerment, prevention, proportionality, protection, partnership and accountability — intended to underpin all safeguarding activity (Department of Health and Social Care, 2018). These principles interact closely with two further pieces of legislation. The Mental Capacity Act 2005 governs how practitioners assess and respond to adults whose capacity to make a specific decision is in question, embedding a presumption of capacity and requiring that any intervention be the least restrictive option available. The Human Rights Act 1998 imposes a duty on public authorities to act compatibly with Convention rights, most obviously Article 3 (freedom from inhuman or degrading treatment) and Article 8 (respect for private and family life), both of which are frequently engaged in safeguarding decisions that balance protection against autonomy.

The local policy framework under review translates this legislative architecture into operational guidance for frontline social workers, setting out thresholds for raising a safeguarding concern, timescales for initial enquiries, and escalation routes to the SAB. In principle, this three-tier structure of legislation, statutory guidance and local policy should ensure consistency of practice across the authority. In practice, as the analysis below demonstrates, the translation from principle to procedure is where much of the framework’s effectiveness is either realised or lost.

The statutory guidance also sets out the categories of abuse and neglect that a local safeguarding policy must be equipped to recognise: physical, sexual, psychological, financial or material, discriminatory and organisational abuse, neglect and acts of omission, self-neglect, domestic abuse, and modern slavery (Department of Health and Social Care, 2018). The policy reviewed for this coursework mirrors this list closely, providing practitioners with short indicator lists for each category. This breadth is a strength, since it signals that safeguarding is not confined to a narrow, physical-harm definition, but it also creates a training burden: frontline staff must hold working knowledge of ten distinct abuse categories, each with different legal thresholds and appropriate responses, alongside their substantive casework.

A further layer of complexity arises where an adult’s liberty is restricted as part of their care arrangements. Where a person lacking capacity to consent to their care arrangements is, in effect, deprived of their liberty in a care home or supported living setting, additional authorisation is required under the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) framework attached to the Mental Capacity Act 2005, pending the government’s long-delayed replacement of DoLS with the Liberty Protection Safeguards. The local policy under review correctly requires safeguarding practitioners to check DoLS status as a routine part of any section 42 enquiry involving a care home resident, ensuring that capacity and liberty considerations are not treated as a separate process running in parallel to safeguarding, but as integrated elements of the same protective response.

Critical Analysis of the Six Safeguarding Principles

Table 1 summarises each of the six principles alongside its intended practice application and a corresponding critical limitation identified in the safeguarding literature and in the policy documents reviewed for this coursework.

The proportionality principle is arguably the most contested in practice. It is designed to prevent disproportionate state intervention into private life, yet in cases of self-neglect — where an adult’s own choices create risk to themselves rather than a third party — proportionality can shade into a rationale for non-intervention that leaves genuinely vulnerable adults unsupported (Braye, Orr and Preston-Shoot, 2015). Whittaker and Havard (2016) term this dynamic ‘defensive practice’, whereby proportionality is invoked to manage resource pressure and professional risk rather than to genuinely calibrate the response to the level of harm presented. Partnership working shows a comparable gap between design and delivery: Manthorpe and Samsi (2016) found that Safeguarding Adults Boards function effectively where individual relationships between partner agencies are strong, but that the statutory partnership structure alone does not guarantee this, meaning outcomes for adults can depend on which practitioners happen to be involved in a case rather than on the policy itself.

The remaining three principles show a comparable pattern of sound design undermined by inconsistent delivery. Prevention is written into the policy through self-neglect protocols and referral routes into community equipment, housing and voluntary-sector support, yet these preventative pathways are themselves subject to non-statutory, discretionary local authority funding, meaning that in periods of budget pressure it is precisely the prevention agenda — least visible in immediate risk terms — that is most likely to be scaled back. Protection is operationalised through access to independent advocacy under section 68 of the Care Act, but the statutory duty to provide an advocate applies only where an adult would otherwise have ‘substantial difficulty’ in being involved in the process and has no appropriate person to support them; the policy’s advocacy referral form leaves considerable professional discretion in determining what counts as ‘substantial difficulty’, creating scope for inconsistent application across teams. Accountability, finally, is evidenced in the policy chiefly through case-audit compliance rates and SAR completion timescales, both of which measure whether a process happened rather than whether the adult concerned experienced a better outcome as a result — a distinction that Making Safeguarding Personal was explicitly designed to correct, but which audit and inspection regimes have been slower to reflect in practice.

Application to Practice: A Case Illustration

The tensions identified above can be illustrated through an anonymised composite case drawn from typical local authority safeguarding referrals. Mrs J, aged 83, lives alone with a diagnosis of vascular dementia. A district nurse raised a safeguarding concern after observing an unkempt home environment, unexplained weight loss and non-compliance with prescribed medication — indicators consistent with self-neglect. A section 42 enquiry was opened, and a mental capacity assessment found that Mrs J retained capacity to make decisions about her day-to-day care, though not about complex financial matters.

The empowerment principle was applied through a person-led conversation in which Mrs J stated clearly that she wished to remain in her own home. The proportionality principle was used, appropriately in this instance, to avoid an unnecessary move to residential care, favouring instead a package of daily carer visits (protection) agreed jointly by the social worker, GP and occupational therapist (partnership). A follow-up review was scheduled at six weeks to evidence outcome monitoring (accountability). On its face, the case demonstrates the six principles operating coherently together.

The decision-making process behind this outcome is instructive in its own right. Because Mrs J’s capacity was decision-specific rather than global, the social worker was required to complete a separate two-stage capacity assessment for each contested decision under the Mental Capacity Act 2005: first, whether Mrs J had an impairment of the mind or brain; and second, whether that impairment meant she was unable to understand, retain, weigh or communicate a decision about her care at the time it needed to be made. Having established that Mrs J retained capacity to decide where she lived but not to manage her direct-payment finances unsupported, the team convened a best-interests discussion limited to the financial element alone, appointing an appointee to manage day-to-day bills while leaving all care and accommodation decisions with Mrs J herself. This graduated, decision-specific approach is precisely what the empowerment principle envisages, and it stands in useful contrast to a more blanket, welfare-led response that might have removed Mrs J’s decision-making authority across the board on the basis of a single diagnosis.

However, closer scrutiny of the case timeline exposes the gap between policy intent and operational capacity that the literature review above anticipates. The authority’s internal target for an initial safeguarding response is five working days; in Mrs J’s case, the first visit occurred on day fifteen because of team caseload pressures. Staff turnover within the locality team meant three different social workers were involved with Mrs J over a two-month period, undermining the relationship-based practice that Making Safeguarding Personal itself depends upon. These delays and discontinuities are consistent with the national picture described by Preston-Shoot (2020), whose analysis of Safeguarding Adult Reviews involving self-neglect repeatedly identifies workforce capacity and inconsistent case ownership as recurring contributory factors, echoing earlier findings from high-profile reviews such as that following the Winterbourne View abuse scandal, where a lack of professional curiosity and poor information sharing between agencies were identified as central failings (Flynn, 2012).

Evaluation Against Person-Centred and Strengths-Based Care

The Social Care Institute for Excellence’s strengths-based practice framework asks practitioners to build safeguarding responses around what an adult can do and wants, rather than defaulting to a deficit-based, risk-averse assessment (Social Care Institute for Excellence, 2019). The policy framework reviewed here explicitly adopts this language, yet national data collected by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (2021) indicate that many local authorities are still unable to report reliably against Making Safeguarding Personal outcome measures, meaning it is difficult to evidence whether empowerment is genuinely being achieved or is simply asserted in case records.

A further tension exists between the rhetoric of empowerment and the resource-led eligibility criteria set out in sections 9 to 13 of the Care Act, which determine whether an adult qualifies for funded support at all. An adult can be empowered to state a preferred outcome that the eligibility framework then cannot fund, producing a gap between stated policy values and lived experience. This is compounded by an equalities dimension: adults from minority ethnic communities, LGBTQ+ adults, and adults with communication-affecting disabilities may face additional barriers to being heard within safeguarding conversations, a dimension the reviewed policy addresses only briefly. Embedding an explicitly intersectional lens within SAB training would strengthen the framework’s stated commitment to empowerment and partnership alike.

It is also worth situating the policy’s self-assessment against the external inspection framework it now sits within. Since 2023, the Care Quality Commission has held a statutory duty to assess local authorities’ delivery of their Care Act functions, including safeguarding, against a single national assessment framework. Where CQC assessments have identified weaknesses in local safeguarding arrangements, workforce capacity and inconsistent outcome recording are recurring themes, mirroring precisely the limitations surfaced by the case illustration above. This external validation suggests the weaknesses identified here are neither an isolated feature of one authority’s policy nor an artefact of a single case, but a structural feature of how safeguarding is currently resourced and evidenced across much of the sector, which strengthens rather than undermines the case for the recommendations that follow.

Conclusion and Recommendations

The Care Act 2014’s shift towards person-centred, outcome-focused safeguarding represents a genuine improvement on the procedural, investigation-led model that preceded it. The six safeguarding principles provide a coherent conceptual framework, and the case illustration shows they can operate effectively when properly resourced. However, both the case example and the wider literature reviewed here point towards the same structural weaknesses: workforce capacity, inconsistent advocacy commissioning, and an absence of robust outcome measurement that would allow the accountability principle to be more than aspirational.

Four recommendations follow. First, ring-fenced investment in independent advocacy provision would give practical substance to the empowerment principle. Second, a standardised Making Safeguarding Personal outcome-measurement tool should be adopted consistently across the SAB’s constituent members and reported publicly, strengthening accountability. Third, protected caseload ratios within locality safeguarding teams would help preserve the relationship-based practice on which empowerment and prevention both depend. Fourth, mandatory training on self-neglect and intersectional practice, informed directly by Safeguarding Adult Review learning, would help close the gap between the proportionality principle as written and as applied. Taken together, these changes would move the framework from principled aspiration towards consistently protective and empowering practice.

References

Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (2021) Safeguarding Adults Annual Report 2020–21. London: ADASS.

Braye, S., Orr, D. and Preston-Shoot, M. (2015) Self-Neglect Policy and Practice: Building an Evidence Base for Adult Social Care. London: Social Care Institute for Excellence.

Care Act 2014. London: The Stationery Office.

Department of Health and Social Care (2018) Care and Support Statutory Guidance: Issued Under the Care Act 2014. London: DHSC.

Flynn, M. (2012) Winterbourne View Hospital: A Serious Case Review. South Gloucestershire: South Gloucestershire Safeguarding Adults Board.

Human Rights Act 1998. London: The Stationery Office.

Local Government Association and Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (2019) Making Safeguarding Personal: Guide 2019. London: LGA.

Manthorpe, J. and Samsi, K. (2016) ‘Managing the interface between prevention and safeguarding: the role of safeguarding adults boards’, Journal of Adult Protection, 18(6), pp. 331–341.

Mental Capacity Act 2005. London: The Stationery Office.

Preston-Shoot, M. (2020) ‘On self-neglect and safeguarding adult reviews: diminishing returns or adding value?’, Journal of Adult Protection, 22(2), pp. 60–75.

Social Care Institute for Excellence (2019) Strengths-Based Approaches: Practice Framework and Practice Handbook. London: SCIE.

Whittaker, K. and Havard, T. (2016) ‘Defensive practice as ‘fear-based’ practice: social work’s open secret?’, British Journal of Social Work, 46(5), pp. 1158–1174.