YJB to improve work opportunities for young offenders

In a bid to improve the resettlement of young offenders leaving custody, the Youth Justice Board (YJB) will trial employer forums in London and Greater Manchester, in what is being called the Turn Around to Work initiative.

The aim is to improve work skills and prospects for 16- to 18-year-olds leaving custody by providing them with work experience and personal development support.

The initiative will bring together a range of organisations, including national and local employers, to help provide training, corporate mentoring and work experience opportunities for young people on their return into the community.

While on placement, young people will be supported through the Department for Education’s Youth Contract initiative or the Department for Work and Pensions Work Programme, to help ensure that their placements are successful, with a view to establishing longer-term employment, training and education options.

“As with resettlement consortia, this work is focused in high-custody areas,” a YJB spokesperson said.  

“Turn Around to Work will initially be piloted in London and Greater Manchester, with a view to its being introduced nationally if it is successful.”

The YJB has also said it is working to ensure young people leaving custody have suitable, secure and safe accommodation.

It said it is looking into “immediate ways” it can help address the issue that sometimes young people do not have safe accommodation to go to.

Meanwhile it has successfully teamed up with the National Offender Management Service to secure European Social Fund money to create payment-by-results youth resettlement support worker posts.

The support workers, who will be based in in London, the West Midlands and the North West, will work with 16- to 18-year-olds leaving young offender institutions (YOIs). They will be in place for five years from July 2015.