PROJECT: Leeds Safe Taskforce
PURPOSE: To improve attendance and engagement with school for young people at risk of violence
FUNDING: £3.7mn from the Department for Education from 2022/23 to 2024/25, including £2.2mn for mentors and £800,000 for training and group activities
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BACKGROUND
Leeds Safe Taskforce aims to reduce youth crime by helping young people at risk of involvement in violence re-engage with education. This is part of the government's Beating Crime Plan published in July 2021, which came with a £30mn investment in specialist support in schools in 10 serious violence hotspots across England.
Safe stands for support, attend, fulfil and exceed – supporting young people with challenging behaviour, improving attendance at school, helping children fulfil their potential, and exceeding expectations.
The main intervention is a mentoring service delivered by schools, area inclusion partnerships – groups of local schools that co-ordinate and deliver services – and St Giles Trust, a charity that works with disadvantaged people. St Giles Trust employs 16 of the programme's 26 mentors and trains the rest. In addition, it delivers professional development for school staff, assemblies and after-school activities.
In 2022, Leeds had the highest rate of 16- to 17-year-olds who were not in education employment or training (Neet) or whose destination after school was unknown at 7.8% compared with a national average of 4.7%.
The Safe Taskforce programme aims to intervene early, targeting younger pupils aged 11 to 14 at 24 secondary schools across Leeds.
ACTION
Young people are referred to the programme by schools with parents' consent. Many face complex issues, including familial abuse, gang influences and mental health challenges. Key reasons for referrals include poor attendance and behaviour problems, explains Dom Oliver, community delivery manager at St Giles Trust. “Teachers may think a young person is involved in child criminal exploitation or county lines or they are known to be out and about at night committing crimes,” he says.
Mentoring sessions are one-to-one discussions delivered over 12 months with the aim of building confidence and addressing personal challenges. Sessions can be scheduled, focusing on specific themes such as purpose and direction, triggers and grooming, or unscheduled according to need. Mentors each work with about 30 pupils, with those deemed most vulnerable to exploitation – usually around a third – seen the most intensively. This could be for two hours every day as and when needed, with schools integrating the mentoring into the pupil's timetable.
Mentors, many of whom have experience of the criminal justice system, are trained in handling issues like trauma, grooming and domestic abuse and shape the content of the mentoring sessions to suit the young person. In the first mentoring session, the mentor creates an action plan with the young person. “The mentor will talk about the referral and the outcomes the school want – it tends to be improved attendance, engagement with school, and behaviour,” says Oliver. “Over time the process becomes mentee-led.”
Crucially, they must build trust. “The young people have a shell on, and a mentor has to take off the shell piece by piece,” says Oliver. “Some mentees lack a trusted adult in their lives. Over time they see the mentor as an ally and an advocate.”
St Giles facilitators deliver assemblies on weapons awareness and county lines for each year group. They also take after-school sessions for parents or teachers and school staff on how to spot changes in behaviour which could suggest involvement in criminality.
After-school sessions, usually lasting around an hour, are also delivered to children on themes such as aspirations, confidence building, assertiveness and decision-making or social skills.
So far, 6,067 children have attended assemblies and 569 have participated in after-school social skills groups. These groups are run by mentors for up to 12 young people on themes they have chosen such as cooking, sports or gardening – often activities children have not had the opportunity to try before.
“One of the schools has cooking sessions after school – one of our partner agencies comes in and they go through an ingredients list, cook together and then the children take the list to do it at home,” says Oliver. “These sessions allow people to decompress. It's similar to how youth clubs used to work – the children are not on the street walking around where they could be a perpetrator or a victim, they are somewhere learning skills and making friends in a space which is safe.”
OUTCOME
St Giles Trust had worked with 286 young people across 24 schools in Leeds by spring 2024.
It measures progress through a “distance travelled tool”, which assesses changes in attitudes and understanding at the start and end of each term. At the start of the intervention, the mentor scores the young person on a scale of one to five for various categories and mentees do the same for themselves (see graphics).
An interim evaluation report that looked at results for a sample of 16 young people found substantial increases in a range of areas including emotional stability, feelings of positivity and self-worth and understanding of risks.
Average scores out of five for emotional stability, recorded by mentors, increased from 1.6 to three, while scores for ability to solve conflicts increased from 1.7 to 3.1. Average scores for understanding of grooming increased from 1.8 to 3.9 and from 1.8 to 3.6 for understanding of county lines.
There were similar substantial increases in scores recorded by the young people themselves including when it came to their ability to say “no” and understanding of triggers.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Government funding is set to run out at the end of March 2025 with no commitment to extra funding. Some schools have indicated they would be open to funding the programme but opening it up to more year groups. Leeds City Council says it is working with all schools to determine how the impact can be sustained.
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Experience: Taking time out helps Lucy to improve behaviour and attendance
Lucy* had been excluded from school on several occasions for persistent disruptive behaviour and struggled to attend more than a quarter of the time.
“After receiving a referral, I liaised with safeguarding, attendance, behaviour management, and social services teams and her head of year and established Lucy had experienced trauma outside school,” says her Safe Taskforce mentor Ahmed*.
“I rang her mum on numerous occasions and conducted home visits with school attendance officers, but her mum would not return my calls or answer the door.”
However, he did eventually manage to see Lucy. “At first she refused to spend time with me,” says Ahmed. “I told her she could come to have a chat when ready. After the initial meeting she missed 14 scheduled meetings and only after this started to engage.”
Lucy started coming to see Ahmed when she needed time out and at break times. During a session on triggers, she explained she gets frustrated when she is penalised for poor behaviour but teachers don't explain why as well as the fact they don't know how she is feeling.
“I advised her to take time out when she feels like she is going to lose her temper and come to see me or the head of year, and arranged for her to be allocated a pastoral pass to allow her to leave the classroom for a short period of time,” says Ahmed.
One year on, Lucy sees Ahmed at least three or four times per day during her breaks. “She says I help her by ‘being there’ when she needs to speak to someone when she is struggling in school,” says Ahmed. “This term, her attendance is over 80%, with no suspensions.” Teachers say they have seen a big improvement in her behaviour and attitude.
“To enable Lucy to achieve these outcomes, I have had to be persistent and available at all times,” says Ahmed. “I've also found that following up on promises is extremely important, as this gives Lucy the feeling of being listened to as well as developing trust.”
*Names changed
