Intensive support scheme diverts Manchester young people at risk from gangs

• Manchester Youth Zone scheme sees organised crime youth workers support 12 young people

• Programme is in high demand and evaluation shows participants see improvements in personal development skills

ACTION

Manchester Youth Zone runs an early help initiative designed to support young people in the city at risk of getting involved with crime.

The Junior Choices programme has been working with children aged eight- to 12-years-old for the past five years.

Running for 10 weeks at a time, two serious and organised crime youth workers each lead a cohort of 12 young people. The first four weeks consist of one-to-one sessions with the young people, followed by a five-day residential, then a further six weeks of activities in the community.

Referrals to the programme come from a range of partners including schools, Manchester City Council’s early help team and local mental health teams.

Issues that prompt a referral can include violence in the family, older siblings already being known to be at risk of or involved in violent crime or criminally exploited, or parental imprisonment where drugs or drug selling is known to be one of the crimes.

The vast majority of children on the programme have had fixed-term exclusions and may be on the verge of permanent exclusion or already be in alternative education.

“We have around 15 primary schools, seven or eight secondary schools and four or five alternative education providers referring to us,” Amanda Naylor, chief executive of Manchester Youth Zone, says.

“They have seen the impact and the results and they have talked at school networks about the programme.

“That has meant other schools have started to make referrals in. We don’t proactively do any promotional activity for Junior Choices because the demand is so much higher than our capacity to deliver [it].

“For every cohort of 12 young people we have around 25 referrals. We run two cohorts at once so we can work with 24 young people but we have 50 referrals.”

Prior to the start of the 10-week programme, the two youth workers – Danny Jones-Percival and Phil Johnson – identify where the referrals have come from and arrange to do one-to-one work twice a week with each individual.

“For the first few [sessions] it is about getting to know each other,” Johnson says.

“They ask us loads of questions about us and what we do. We’ll ask them questions about home life, school life, everything really.”

This process continues for four weeks, over eight sessions. Johnson and Jones-Percival also speak with parents by phone and conduct a home visit with the aim of building a good relationship with them so they feel confident to call them about any issues.

Naylor says a strength of the approach is that the work being done “does not feel like an assessment” to young people.

“It feels like the team is just trying to find out what makes young people tick,” she says.

“That means they disclose quite a lot, quite early. It’s amazing some of the things that young people disclose to Danny and Phil that they might not disclose to other professionals.”

The assessment phase does not end with the one-to-one sessions. The programme is built on relational practice and trauma-informed practice, with young people encouraged to share with the team on their own terms.

Based on this, the team operates in a strengths-based way, identifying activities that can help build their confidence and stretch them to the appropriate degree.

“The programme is quite challenging, but we need to make sure they are not stretched too much too soon,” Naylor says.

“If, usually at school, they were stretched outside their comfort zone they might kick off, walk out, or cause a fight.

“We do need to stretch them and put them out of their comfort zone during the activity stage and help them create different coping strategies.

“What Danny and Phil do is help them develop different response systems to trauma, work better as a team, and think about different ways they can behave and therefore get a different outcome.

“Those kinds of behaviours are then transferred back into school at the end of the programme.”

Junior Choices is timetabled in such a way that the one-to-one sessions take place directly before a half-term break, during which young people are taken on a residential for five days.

“This could be a trip to the Lake District for gorge walking, canoeing, hiking or other outdoor activities, which is a great way of getting to know the young people,” Jones-Percival says.

“We have done sessions with a group that have gone on a residential, and they have always said it is more impactful when we take them away. You get to know them on a deeper level and they open up.”

Following the residential there are a further six weeks of activities, across 12 sessions, tailored to the interests of the young person.

“In the area we are in it’s quite deprived so families really struggle to take young people to do things,” explains Jones-Percival. “In the past, we have done water sports such as paddleboarding or canoeing, or going to a ski slope, the kind of activities they have never done before.”

Naylor says that while Manchester is supposed to be a city of massive opportunity and boasts leisure, art, and sports facilities, most children on the programme have not been outside a one-mile radius of where they live and go to school.

“This programme is really about getting them out and away from the estate,” she says.

“To take them away from the poverty, the peer pressure, the influences and the grooming and have different conversations out in the open air is a really valuable time with those young people. It provides them with a bit of aspiration and hope that things can be different.”

The programme uses systems theory as a framework to work with the young person’s school or educational setting, looking at what triggers them and what can be done to make it better, showing them the skills young people have and explaining the support they need.

There is also a family worker attached to Junior Choices to do similar work with the families – looking at how the family interacts with the child and potentially offering parenting sessions or family activities to help them be in a better position to support their child.

At the end of each programme, children continue to have additional one-to-one support from the youth zone for at least six months.

Naylor says that by this stage many of them are ready to engage with youth workers and get involved with positive activities. For young people with complex needs, the youth zone seeks to get them ongoing support with other organisations.

The programme has utilised a worker and child joint assessment tool, triangulated with evidence from teachers, parents and peers, to track outcomes.

IMPACT

During a 12-month period, across five personal development skills, young people on the programme reported a 30 per cent increase in confidence, 34 per cent increase in social skills, 28 per cent increase in emotional skills, 30 per cent increase in their health and a 38 per cent increase in their aspirations and achievements.

“We see this programme as a real catalyst for sustainable outcomes,” Naylor says.

Read more in CYP Now’s Early Help Special Report