How YOTs adapted in pandemic
Hannah Smithson, Professor of criminology and youth justice, Manchester Metropolitan University
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Study on the changes youth offending teams have made during Covid-19 and how they adapt in the future.
The pandemic has affected many aspects of our lives, and now a new research project is assessing the impact of Covid-19 on each stage of the youth justice system.
The project – a partnership between Manchester Metropolitan University and the Alliance for Youth Justice and funded by UK Research and Innovation – is exploring the impact of the pandemic on adaptations to working practices, barriers and enablers to effective practice, children’s experiences and views of these adaptations, and the lessons learned for policy and practice.
Taking the Greater Manchester region as a case study, the research team have been working with youth offending teams (YOTs) across the region to understand how they have adapted contact arrangements with children; the strengths and limitations of remote working, and what the future looks like for the youth justice system in a post-covid world.
Adapting how services engage
YOTs have been creative and imaginative within very restrictive circumstances. Contact arrangements were adapted quickly with the majority of teams conducting RAG [red, amber, green] ratings of their caseloads to identify their most vulnerable children. In the early stages of the pandemic, these children received doorstep visits where possible.
Methods of engagement ranged from phone calls, Zoom calls, garden meetings and walk and talks, to sending out resources for children to distribute food parcels for homeless people, writing thank you cards to NHS workers, and sending cards to the elderly.
Views on remote engagement were mixed. Some YOT staff were very positive about it. For instance, they felt that children engaged better with staff remotely.
One intensive supervision and surveillance worker said: “Since we’ve been doing them virtually and at home, we’ve found that young people are more open. When we were face-to-face, they were quite guarded about what they said.”
Others were less positive about their experiences, highlighting the challenges of remote delivery, including the digital divide and children’s dislike of remote working. YOT staff spoke of children’s lack of access to phones, computers and the internet and the challenges this presented for engaging them and their families.
One head of service said: “Because if the family have not got internet access that’s the big issue, isn’t it? Even if we got them something, they wouldn’t be able to use it. So, it is difficult.”
Staff were apprehensive about the longer-term impact of non-engagement with remote delivery, leading to breaches and non-compliance. Engagement with children whom staff had pre-Covid relationships with, was generally viewed as easier to manage compared with new cases.
Many staff raised concerns about the limited opportunity that remote working provided for thorough welfare checks.
One youth justice support worker said: “When you see somebody face-to-face, you can see any marks, bruising, anything that’s concerning, anything that’s on their face, tiredness, any drug use. Whereas over the phone you can’t see those things.”
Aspects of service delivery proved challenging to deliver remotely, if at all. This included reparation, speech and language therapy, mental health provision and counselling. Staff were anxious about the longer-term impacts of the adaptations of these services. An additional worry was the lack of identification of need for these services in a post-Covid world.
A mental health worker said: “Video contact is useless when it comes to mental health. Nothing takes away that face-to-face [contact] with somebody.”
Provision post-Covid
The return to pre-Covid-19 levels of functioning will be a gradual process and this was recognised by the YOTs in relation to their work.
YOTs are apprehensive about children’s responses to a return to more structured face-to-face work and the associated requirements of their orders and interventions. Staff overwhelmingly feel that children will struggle.
A case worker said: “[I expect] a lot more breaches to get them back into that expectation of this is what we have to do now. There’s going to be some resistance there, they’re going to really struggle.”
More general anxieties were raised about children’s potential struggles with mental ill health, school, education, employment and a range of adverse childhood experiences and the role of Covid-19 in exacerbating these experiences and challenges.
A nurse said: “I suppose we don’t really know what’s been missed until it becomes apparent. The experiences that they have lived through at home – it may take some time for all of that to kind of come out.”
While responding rapidly and effectively to circumstances beyond their control, YOTs face considerable challenges to resuming “normal” service delivery. Space and time for YOTs to reflect and plan what their service should look like is a necessity and not a luxury. Government ministers and policymakers need to listen and make clear what additional support will be made available to each stage of the youth justice system to ensure that it can evolve and adapt to deliver a service that genuinely benefits the children it works with in a post-Covid world.
