Children’s home staff and agencies take restorative approach to cut offending

• Council and care home staff use restorative approaches to address offending behaviour rather than involving police
• The scheme has helped cut offending levels by looked-after children

ACTION

In Sunderland, in the early part of the last decade the number of looked-after children who were coming into contact with the criminal justice system was rising and sat above national and regional averages.

It was agreed that action was needed to address this and ensure that young people in residential settings experienced better outcomes and were not criminalised unnecessarily.

“We did some thinking with colleagues in the youth offending service (YOS) about what we could do differently,” says Sharon Willis, strategic service manager for social care at Together for Children Sunderland.

“Some children’s homes at that time were reporting good relationships with police community beat officers so we started to think about how we could better utilise the relationship with them to support us and think about how we respond to situations in a home differently.”

From this, senior leaders at Together for Children, Sunderland YOS and Northumbria Police came together to produce the Joint Agency Protocol. This sets out guidance to the YOS, children’s homes and police on ways to manage difficult behaviour and situations involving children living in residential care without resorting to formal police sanctions, which previously resulted in children receiving a criminal record.

“The protocol supports us to make decisions about young people that we think are going to generate the right outcomes for young people rather than being reactive,” says Willis. “We don’t want to criminalise young people for what we know to be trauma-based behaviour, rather than offending behaviour.”

Linda Mason, service manager for targeted youth services – which encompasses Sunderland YOS – explains how the system works: “In essence, if there has been an incident that the police have been involved in, we say let’s not charge the young person but look to take a restorative justice approach.

“If there is agreement [from the victim], then a youth worker does an assessment of the young person and a victim worker from youth offending talks to any victims involved and then brings them together in a restorative-type meeting.”

These meetings, known as Diversion Panels, are multi-agency events with representatives from the YOS, the police, the victim or a representative for them convened after an incident occurs in a children’s home and a young person is arrested and potentially charged, for example. It also considers the voice of the young person and their looked-after placement.

“The meeting varies depending on the incident and the needs of the young person – and the young person would agree some form of restorative intervention,” adds Mason. “This intervention could be apologising to the victim, or a directed piece of work. It is about being able to explore the impact [the incident] had on the victim and the young person being able to sit there and understand the impact their behaviour had.

“It is very much about relationship building. The police really saw the benefit of that in terms of the outcomes for young people and the victims.”

When the Joint Agency Protocol was being established in practice, Willis says that having commitment on all sides to implement it was crucial. It also meant that all sides understood what was required of them and what the goals for it were.

Implementation of the protocol was successful because children’s home staff bought into the aims of it from an early stage, adds Willis.

“It is about showing belief in what you are doing,” she says.

“This protocol didn’t come with a line of ‘from here on in you [children’s home staff] need to accept anything that’s thrown at you from these young people and we aren’t going to criminalise them,’ it was sold as an approach that is about finding ways to respond to behaviour that was going to result in better outcomes for young people. That was enough to engage with people – because that’s what staff want, they want things to be better for the young people, ultimately.”

IMPACT

Performance data shows that the amount of offending by children who have been looked after continuously for at least 12 months reduced from 16.1 per cent in 2011/12 to 5.1 per cent in 2017/18. Mason says that the data for 2018/19 shows a further decline in offending, although these figures have yet to be verified.

“We have made year-on-year improvements,” she adds. “It has been steady, which I think is to be expected – these things don’t happen magically; slowly you get to a point where your practice is good and well embedded.

“The Joint Agency Protocol has had a really demonstrable impact, and now we need to maintain it and get it even better.”

Now use of the protocol is well embedded among practitioners in residential teams, Mason has noted that a lot of incidents are dealt with by the children’s home, without the need to convene a Diversion Panel.

“We create scenarios in the home by which they can do something restorative or that repairs relationships or damage within the home,” adds Willis. “We find that we end up with a better outcome in terms of learning and experience for the young people. The young people learn to accept that we will always accept them, but what we won’t accept is their behaviour and we will support them in putting that behaviour right.

“The Joint Agency Protocol fits in with the model of practice used by Together for Children in Sunderland, which focuses on a therapeutic model of practice that is all about acceptance, empathy and how professionals relate to young people,” Willis adds.

“In a children’s home setting, if the default position is to ring the flashing blue lights every time we have a situation we aren’t happy with, I don’t know how that makes young people ever feel safe? They need to feel safe and that people responsible for caring for them are able to manage situations even if they are displaying very difficult trauma-based behaviour.

“Everything we know tells us young people who are criminalised go on to have significantly poorer outcomes than other young people. The fact they are living in a children’s home is indicative that they have experienced a level of trauma and it is not our aim to re-enact that trauma through processes that are far more fitting for adults than children. It is our role to repair relationships through positive role modelling and healing.”

The Joint Agency Protocol has also led to more early intervention work with young people in children’s homes who are displaying challenging behaviours. Children’s home staff engage with colleagues in the police and YOS to provide victim awareness work with the young person, with the aim of stopping the situation escalating to a point where previously the police may have been called and a young person charged with an offence.