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Follow Canada's example
Phrases like youth crime and knife crime have become too much a part of our daily lexicon for politicians to claim street violence is anything new. In policy circles we know the truth: youth crime has risen, as have incarceration rates. More children both carry weapons and use them.
The time has come to stop talking about strengthening failed approaches, such as longer sentences, tagging and antisocial behaviour orders. Prolific offenders start young so treatments must start younger. Two things need to happen. First, we need to overhaul alternative education provision. Second, we need an intervention that reaches first-time offenders and diverts them from crime.
Young offender institutions are full of young people who were expelled from school and sent to pupil referral units, where little was expected of them. But young people in Canada aren't written off so quickly. Children with behavioural problems there go to outreach schools, where their behaviour is addressed by specialist staff.
Outreach schools have staying-on rates in some areas of 95 per cent - higher than the UK's mainstream staying-on rate - and cost no more than pupil referral units. Why do we not have outreach schools here?
- Lisa Harker, co-director, Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
Youth justice on Channel Five
Readers may have noticed Channel Five's recent foray into the youth justice arena. Banged Up follows 10 young men aged 16 and 17 as they come to terms with life in Scarborough Prison. The idea is to persuade the young men, most of whom already have experience of petty crime, to change their ways through exposure to the harsh world of prison life.
It's a long way from the prisons-as-holiday-camps routine the tabloids love and is all the better for it. Intriguingly, the programme ended with the arrival of older ex-offenders who know a thing or two about prison and its impact on life choices. Since the use of credible role models is becoming more common in the youth justice field, we will watch this latest social justice experiment with interest.
- Angela Browne, research manager, QA Research
Positive start for early years
I welcome the first stages of dialogue about career development for early years professionals.
Achieving the government target of an early years professional curriculum leader in every children's centre by 2010 - and in every early years setting by 2015 - will entail a sustained programme of professional development for each annual cohort of early years professionals.
Our recent first positive meeting with the Children's Workforce Development Council heralds a fruitful dialogue, which promises to establish positive principles that can add increasing value to the work of early years professionals and help to establish their status.
- John Chowcat, general secretary, Aspect.
