Agenda item

The Plan sets out how services are to be organised and funded and what functions they will carry out to prevent youth offending and re-offending across Bath and North East Somerset.

The Director of Children's Services & Education introduced this report to the Panel. She explained that the Local Authority has a statutory duty, in partnership with Health, Police and Probation, to produce an annual Youth Justice Plan and that the Plan sets out how services are to be organised and funded and what functions they will carry out to prevent youth offending and re-offending across Bath and North East Somerset.

She stated that the Plan is also due to be presented to Cabinet, then Council for approval and then submitted to the national Youth Justice Board (YJB).

She also gave the Panel a presentation on the matter, a copy of which will be available as an online appendix to these minutes and a summary is set out below.

Crime and Disorder Act 1998

·  Establishment of multi-agency Youth Offending Teams (YOT)

·  Council as lead partner, with Health, Probation and Police Services having a duty to co-operate and help resource

·  Statutory purpose to prevent children offending

·  Requirement to produce an annual Youth Justice Plan

·  Receipt of national grant dependent on submission of the Plan

Child First Principles

1.  See children as children – Prioritise best interests of children, recognising their particular needs, capacities, rights and potential. All work is child-focused and developmentally informed

2.  Develop pro-social identity for positive child outcomes – Promote children’s individual strengths and capacities as a means of developing their pro-social identity for sustainable desistance…. All work is constructive and future-focused, built on supportive relationships that empower children to fulfil their potential and make positive contributions to society

3.  Collaboration with children – Encourage children’s active participation, engagement and wider social inclusion. All work is meaningful collaboration with children and their carers

4.   Promote diversion – Promote a childhood removed from the justice system, using pre-emptive prevention, diversion, and minimal intervention. All work minimises criminogenic stigma from contact with the system.

Prevention and Diversion

• Rate of children coming into justice system is lowest it has been since 2000
• More children go to Out of Court Disposal Panel or are diverted by Police

Re-Offending after 12 months

• Latest comparative data is for July 2019 - June 2020 cohort
• 32% children re-offended, lower than all comparators apart from ‘family’ group (31.5%)
• Of those who did re-offend, the average number of new offences was 2.88, much better than all comparators (range from 3.61 – 3.9)

Custodial sentencing

·  Number very low – none in the last 12 months. Also, no custodial remands in the last 12 months

·  Strong community proposals have enabled Court to sentence in the community

·  Wider context of considerably reducing child custodial population

Strategic Priorities

1.  Strengthen participation – Children’s, parents’/carers’ and victims’. YOT Management Board meetings to begin with either a case study or an item that highlights the ‘Voice of the Child’.

2.  Address disproportionality – Black and dual heritage children, girls and those with SEND

3.  Extend practice models – Trauma informed, systemic and restorative practice

4.  Tackle exploitation – Contextual safeguarding audit, serious violence duty and drugs and alcohol legislation

5.  Support workforce – Including health and wellbeing, return to Keynsham Civic Centre training and development and Inspection readiness.

Councillor Liz Hardman said that she had submitted three questions regarding this report and was aware that responses had been given in writing by the Head of Young People's Prevention Services. These are set out below.

It was good to see that that there have been reductions in first-time entrants into the Youth Justice system and numbers reoffending. However there still is the concern about children from BAME backgrounds being over represented in the criminal justice system.

It’s very interesting to note that a correlation has now been made between fixed term and permanent exclusions and effect these have on making children vulnerable to antisocial behaviour and offending. I believe we do not have any figures on the numbers being excluded who are of BAME backgrounds. The Lammy report due in July should give us more information about this.

Q1: In your work plan you do say a strategic priority is addressing disproportionality. How you will do that is to address the recommendations in the Avon and Somerset criminal justice board identifying disproportionality. Can you explain how you will achieve this?

The Youth Justice Plan that was circulated was a draft version and further work has been done on it since, in response to feedback received. I apologise that the draft was muddled in how it described the Lammy Report which was actually launched on 29 April 2022.

Reply: There are 83 recommendations across the criminal justice system, many arising from insufficient data (as David Lammy found in his original review published in 2017). It has been agreed that all those relating to the work of the YOS and Inclusion Services in B&NES will be overseen by the YOS Management Board, but there may also be an Avon and Somerset-wide group looking at the links between lack of engagement in education and youth offending across the 5 Local Authorities. I have started some work with our HR department, looking at disproportionality in our staff group and how we can encourage a more representative field of applications when we advertise vacancies; this will feed into wider work in the Council, and of course, our statutory partners are also asked to look at these issues regarding the staff they employ for the Youth Offending Service. At a more operational level, a multi-agency group recently convened by Jason Pegg from Black Families Education Project, will be working to address exclusions and the Violence Reduction Unit is looking for ways to continue its Education Inclusion offer of one-to-one support for children at high risk of permanent exclusion, coupled with strategic support for schools. Across Avon and Somerset, Chief Constable Sarah Crew will be chairing a group to oversee all the responses to this report and I imagine the work flowing from it will remain high profile and be receiving attention for some time. I will be drafting an action plan specifically for the YOS, drawing on the Identifying Disproportionality recommendations and those made in the recent thematic Inspection on Black and Mixed Heritage Boys in the youth justice system.

Q2: For post 16 children, the numbers who are NEET working with the YOS have been much higher than the national NEET percentages for this age group. I see that a lot of support has been put in place for these young people.

With this support have the numbers been reducing from 32% to more like the national average between two and 3% or it it too early to say?

Reply: NEET children – whilst the number we see in the youth justice system is unacceptably high, given the correlation between lack of engagement in education, training and employment and involvement in offending, we have to accept it will always be higher than the national average. The recently published thematic Inspection of ETE in YOSs found that 39% of the case sample reviewed who were over school age were not in education, training or employment, an even higher proportion than in B&NES. The YOS now works with a smaller cohort of children and is able to provide very hands-on support where needed, including supporting attendance at College and for interviews etc. A multi-agency group chaired by Leigh Zywek has just been established to look at the NEET issue and the YOS will be getting involved with this work.

Q3: It is worrying to see that more than half of those known to the YOS have some special educational needs or disability, with numbers increasing.

Is there any special needs support in place for these children? Is Compass the only team that is supporting these children?

Reply: The YOS has a very proactive Education Officer who contributes to meeting needs and improving outcomes for all YOS children with SEND, as do practitioners across the team. They are pleased to work well with the local SEND team who were recognised as ‘good’ in their last inspection.

Councillor Paul May commented that it was important that the system works so well and it was a credit to all involved that it does.

Councillor Andy Wait asked how more substantial academy attendance data could be provided to the Avon & Somerset Police Scrutiny Panel and whether the Council had the same problem.

The Head of Education Inclusion Service replied that the Council does also have some difficulty in receiving this information. She added that it is provided by most of the academies, but it can depend on how the Liquid Logic system interpretates it. She added that it was possible that the Children Missing Education team could help provide the data.

She said that the Council retains attendance information until the young people are 16 and then it is retained by Youth Connect.

Councillor Paul May said that he would like the Panel to be sent the report of the HMI Probation inspection of B&NES Youth Offending Service when it has been carried out.

The Director of Children's Services & Education replied that they were preparing for an inspection in the near future and had carried out a Self-Assessment at the recent YOT Development Day. She added that this could be shared with the Panel.

Councillor May said that he would welcome that.

The Chair read out two questions that had been submitted by Kevin Burnett. The Head of Young People's Prevention Services had provided a written response and these are set out below.

Q1: Please could it be explained where in the workplan is the preventative work with schools and the Youth Forum to address and support vulnerable pupils in terms of attendance, exclusions, SEND and NEET, and what does this work involve?

Reply: The Youth Offending Service has a dedicated Education Officer who works with all children known to the Service who experience difficulties with engagement in education, training and employment. The Work Plan includes an action to address the high proportion of children with SEND known to the youth justice system (‘convene a working group with key local authority managers to consider and investigate disproportionality issues for children with SEND in the youth justice system and formulate a response and action plan in light of the Thematic HMIP Thematic Inspection of Education, Training and Employment Services in Youth Offending Services in England and Wales’). Since this version of the Youth Justice Plan was drafted, in response to other feedback, there is now a second, broader action in relation to other aspects of this same thematic inspection report (‘develop and deliver local responses to recommendations in HMI Probation’s thematic inspection’).

In addition, in the last 6 months, one of the YOS’s Compass workers has taken on temporary additional hours to provide one-to-one support for children at high risk of exclusion. This has been funded by the Violence Reduction Unit through an additional in-year grant, and the work to take this initiative forward sits within the Serious Violence Work Plan. Through the Education Inclusion Project, a full-time officer based within the Education Inclusion Service has worked closely with schools to help them work on constructive responses to children’s behaviour and has also worked at a strategic level to review policies and produce a schools’ toolkit. The Compass Worker offered short, focused interventions with children and their parents/carers, typically across just 6 weeks, building on a model established in Bristol. Both strands of this work have received positive feedback from schools and it is believed they have helped support a reduction in permanent exclusions this year.

Q2: Please could someone explain more about the Ofsted recommendation re: ‘return home interviews’?

Reply: This is what Ofsted said:

·  When children return after having been missing from home or care, the learning from conversations held with them is not consistently well used to reduce the likelihood of them going missing again or to identify any wider patterns or trends.

·  There is an inconsistent approach to how return home interviews (RHI) are conducted and recorded. Many RHI forms are blank or not easily accessed on the child’s record once they return safely, meaning that social workers cannot easily analyse why children went missing, whether risks are escalating and how to help reduce these risks. This also undermines the ability to draw together themes arising from episodes of children going missing and wider intelligence.

·  What needs to improve? How effectively children are supported to take up return home interviews, and how well the learning from interviews is used to reduce the likelihood of them going missing again and to identify any wider patterns or trends.

Compass hold dedicated return home interview meetings as the children they see are mostly not known to Social Care, and they record them on a standard template. Children who take up the offer of a return home interview sometimes choose to have this with their allocated Social Worker who may talk with them about the missing episode as part of their next contact and record this in a file note rather than on the standard template. We are addressing this but our priority is to increase the number of children accepting the offer of return home interviews. SC is now chairing a multi-agency task and finish group including one of the Youth Ambassadors, to review processes and practice and update the Missing Protocol. In turn, this will enable us to run more accurate reports and understand this cohort of children better and be able to plan how better to support them not to go missing again.

The Panel RESOLVED to note and approve the plans for the delivery of youth justice services in the year ahead.