Half of youth offending services require improvement, inspectors say
Neil Puffett
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
More than half of youth offending services (YOS) inspected in the last year need to improve their work, HM Inspectorate of Probation has revealed.
The inspectorate's annual report, published today, reveals that although one service inspected in 2019/20 (Camden) was rated "outstanding" and six (Brent, Bury and Rochdale, Leicester, North Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, and Southampton) were rated "good" the remaing nine of the 16 services visited in the period fell below required standards.
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Twenty years of youth offending teams
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Interview: Justin Russell, HM chief inspector, Probation Service
Eight services (Birmingham, Bradford, Croydon, Gloucestershire, Leeds, Luton, Medway, and Nottingham) were rated "requires improvement", while provision in Cardiff was found to be "inadequate".
Inspectors found assessment of the risk young offenders pose of causing harm to themselves or to others emerged again as a key area of concern. As YOS caseloads have shrunk, as a result of falling local crime rates due to lockdown, they have become more dominated by violent offences, with these making up 50 per cent of the court cases of the 16 services inspected.
"Although much of this violence may be against other young people, we’ve also found significant violence by children against parents, for example by older boys against single mothers, and this violence and controlling behaviour became worse during lockdown in some households," the report states.
"This is a worrying development. Further research and new interventions are needed to support the parents affected, to whom youth offending teams (YOTs) have as much a duty of care as they do to the child themselves."
Meanwhile, the quality of work with out-of-court disposals was again found to be worse than for cases sentenced by the court, and worst of all for "community resolution" cases diverted from the formal youth justice system altogether.
Chief Inspector Justin Russell said that with numbers of children in custody at a record low - with only 563 children under-18 in custody as of July 2020, due to the closure of youth courts because of the Covid pandemic - it is "all the more inexcusable that the support offered to the relatively small number of children leaving custody each year remains so poor".
“It is disappointing that the overall quality of the youth offending services we have inspected this year is worse than last year, with more than half requiring some improvement.
“Overall, the weakest area of performance across all the cases we inspected is the effective assessment and management of risk of harm – an area on which we place significant emphasis. Given that half of the court cases we inspected involved violent offences, and 85 per cent of young people going through the courts are assessed as presenting some risk of harm, this is not good enough.
“We were also concerned to see a decline in the scores for governance, leadership and management and that work with cases diverted from court remains of poorer quality than those going through the court system.”
However, in terms of the response to the Covid panndemic, Russell said youth offending teams, and the children they work with, "has been impressive and is to be commended".
“The services are, overall, rising to the challenge, though we had concerns about poor access to education and increased adolescent on parent violence during lockdown. Many teams show initiative in how they maintain contact with children and manage their own staff working at home, despite a lack of vital IT equipment and sufficient broadband in some areas.”