Coaching for a crime-free life

Youth offending services (YOS) in London have teamed up with a national charity to provide life coaching for young people to reduce the risk of reoffending.

Lewisham YOS and Southwark YOS are the first to offer the life coaching to young offenders, with another four youth offending teams set to follow suit shortly.

The YOSs will initially offer 10 young people aged 15-18 who have been released from youth custody or those in the community at risk of a custodial sentence a 10-session life-coaching programme that has been developed by Spark Inside, a charity that works with offenders.

The programme, Hero’s Journey, is usually delivered in custodial settings with young adults and young people – it has been used with young males in young offenders institutions (YOIs) and prisons since 2013 (see below). But this is the first time it has been offered in the community, and Spark Inside has adapted it to reflect this.

Through the pilot, the YOSs will refer people to the programme when they leave custody or when their offending in the community indicates they are on a path to receiving a custodial sentence. Participation is voluntary.

Professional coaches

Young people receive one-to-one support from Spark Inside’s professional coaches over 10 sessions, but with no time limited placed on when these take place.

The adapted Hero’s Journey programme is a strengths-based approach that is designed to enable desistence from crime through building young people’s resilience, improving their decision-making and encouraging a more optimistic future outlook.

Young people will be able to choose their preferred coach, who they will work with to identify and move toward their goals. Spark Inside says that while life coaching is inherently directed by the client, sessions will, over time, help the young person to address issues including employment, support networks and their place in society.

“We know coaching works with young people in prisons – young people in the community need this now more than ever,” says Spark Inside’s chief executive Vicki Cardwell. “Coaching is always tailored to each individual, taking account of, for example, ethnicity, gender or socio-economic factors. This enables the best-suited approach to each young person’s unique challenges and opportunities for growth, as identified by the young person themselves.”

Whereas there is a group work element to the custody-based programme, all of the work for the pilot will be delivered one-to-one due to Covid restrictions. The first session is face-to-face to help build the rapport between coach and young person, but subsequent sessions will be virtual or by phone.

Spark Inside say the programme is timely as it supports the recent shift in youth justice policy and practice to “child first” principles. In 2019, the Youth Justice Board published updated standards for services that focus on prioritising the needs of young people and their potential, build on individual’s strengths and capabilities, develop a pro-social identity for sustainable desistance from crime, and encourage participation and engagement from the young person.

“In policy terms, the non-directive approach and one-to-one support ensures we remain ‘child-first’,” explains Cardwell. “This means factors like developmental maturity can be identified and responded to, protecting the rights of the child.”

Long-term solutions

Spark Inside says life coaching is a “hidden tool” of increasing interest to youth justice services as they find long-term solutions for young people facing complex problems, and expects the number of participants in the pilot to rise as more YOSs join the programme.

Andrew Hillas, head of Southwark YOS, says: “The pilot is a great opportunity to support our young people to appreciate their own strengths and capacity for change, and we expect that to reflect positively in helping us as a service to avoid first-time entrants into the criminal justice system.

“We’re also focused on having strong ‘exit-plans’ for young people already on our caseloads, and we believe that the pilot’s one-to-one approach is a great strength there; desistence theory and wider research approaches are clear that long-term change is grounded in supportive relationships.”

Hillas believes professional life coaches can have a significant impact on young people.

“We have a volunteer mentoring service, which we greatly value, but we believe in the quality of the programme structure and its coaches – and that quality will be reflected in the results of the pilot,” he says. “That will contribute to keeping our young people out of the criminal justice system in the first place, or helping them develop a sense of themselves that allows them to grow social capital and flourish out in the world.”

SPARK INSIDE CUSTODY PROGRAMME OUTCOMES

In 2013, Spark Inside launched a 12-month pilot of Hero’s Journey involving eight 15- to 18-year-olds in Feltham and Cookham Wood YOIs.

This was commissioned by South London and North East London Resettlement consortia, multi-agency partnerships of youth offending teams, children’s services and others aiming to improve outcomes for under-18s emerging from custody. The consortia referred potential participants to the programme once they were six months away from release.

An independent evaluation found just one of the eight participants had been re-convicted a year after release. This was for a minor offence breaching probation conditions. Meanwhile, all eight were actively engaged in education, employment or training.

A subsequent three-year independent evaluation of Hero’s Journey from 2016-19 found that life-coaching made a clear, positive impact on the lives of over 350 young men in prison. Decision making and problem-solving improved by eight per cent.