Youth offending services: Inspections Clinic

The latest annual report on youth offending services (YOS) in England and Wales from HM Inspectorate of Probation found more than half needed to make improvements.

Of the 16 services inspected in 2019/20, eight were rated “requires improvement” while Cardiff YOS was rated “inadequate”.

Chief inspector of probation Justin Russell says it was disappointing to find the overall quality of services was worse than those inspected the previous year.

Speaking to CYPNow before the latest Covid-19 restrictions were imposed, he says a key message from the annual report was the importance of leadership and management in delivering good youth offending services.

Nine of the 16 services inspected were found to require some improvement in leadership and governance.

“We focus on the management boards of youth offending teams (YOTs) which bring together all the key agencies and also the principal head of service roles,” says Russell. “Where we find inadequacies in youth offending services it is quite often because there are problems with both those things.”

Services with leadership and management issues have often experienced a high degree of churn in heads of service with people in that role expected to take on other responsibilities, he adds.

“So they weren’t just being the head of the YOT service, they might also be looking after early help or looked-after children, which we felt was just too big a span to do properly,” he says.

Data failures

Another trend among services not performing as well as they should is a failure to look at a wide enough range of data on the children they work with, explains Russell.

“So they weren’t looking at the performance of the YOT in relation to looked-after children or scrutinising education data – they were just relying on headline indicators,” he says.

The three national indicators used to measure YOT performance are re-offending rates, first-time entry rates – the number of young people coming into the criminal justice system for the first time – and custody rates.

“All of those things are important but they are actually measures of the overall way the criminal justice system is working locally,” says Russell.

“Some schemes are thought to be performing well on measures like first-time entry but we end up rating them inadequate because they’re not properly supporting the children they’re working with.”

Where services are doing well, leaders have a clear vision for the service. “They are really scrutinising the data that is coming back on the needs of children, advocating for those children and escalating issues arising,” says Russell. “They are also trying to break down barriers with other services making sure YOTs are working well with early help, children’s services and social workers, or with health.”

The weakest area of performance was around the assessment and management of risk of harm.

This is a particular concern given half the court cases the inspectorate looked at involved violent offences while 85 per cent of children going through the courts are assessed as presenting some risk of harm to others.

“It’s important these risks are identified and we found they were being missed,” says Russell. These include risks to other family members like siblings and parents and young partners as well as the wider community.

Russell highlights support for looked-after children as another key concern. Of the 768 cases inspected, 19 per cent of young people were on child protection plans and 18 per cent were in care.

“We looked at the quality of support and supervision that group was getting – particularly the ones in out-of-area placements – and it seemed significantly worse than the children’s who aren’t looked-after,” says Russell, who would like to see a greater focus on this vulnerable group going forward.

The pandemic has thrown up various issues.

“We found staff and managers in YOTs were really committed to trying to keep the service going and, in general, did manage to do that,” says Russell.

However, a big problem was an all too apparent “digital divide” with nearly half of young people on YOT caseloads without a laptop or broadband connection.

“That meant they couldn’t be schooled during lockdown so they completely lost contact with schooling and it was difficult for the YOT to run programmes with them,” says Russell. “We found 40 per cent of the caseload didn’t get any education at all during lockdown – even the children actually eligible to go to school – so re-engaging that cohort of children has been a real challenge since September.”

Other issues included difficulties accessing children in custody to formulate resettlement plans and significant backlogs in the court system increasing the risk of young people spending much longer on remand waiting for trials or sentencing.

Positives to come out of the annual report include the fact that about two thirds of YOTs were rated “good” or “outstanding” on staffing while most YOT workers reported their caseloads were manageable.

“The staff we interviewed were very committed to the job and very committed to engaging with children so our scores on engagement and working to identify children’s needs are pretty good,” says Russell.

He says the range of services now offered by some YOTs is “impressive”, including swift access to child and adolescent mental health services, substance abuse workers and support to access education, employment and training. An increasing number of YOTs are starting to employ sessional or full-time speech and language therapists.

The annual report says YOTs are well placed to raise issues of discrimination and inequality in the criminal justice system including the fact black and mixed-heritage boys feature disproportionately in YOT caseloads.

Russell says the inspectorate is planning a thematic inspection on services for black and mixed-heritage boys later this year.

High re-offending rates continue to be a matter for concern with the frequency of re-offending now the highest it has been in the past 10 years.

While caseloads have fallen, the young people who come to YOTs are more likely to be prolific offenders who represent greater risks to others and themselves and may be harder to extract from a life of crime.

“Nevertheless given the smaller caseloads and the other services they are able to provide it would be good to see that rate going down,” says Russell.

Resumption of inspections

Inspections of smaller YOTs were carried out virtually in 2020 but inspections are currently on hold with plans to resume in April or May.

A new standard on the quality of resettlement work is currently being piloted remotely in Sheffield.

Russell says the inspectorate will continue doing thematic inspections including looking at the transition of young people from YOTs to adult probation services and a joint piece of work with the prisons inspectorate on girls in custody and their resettlement.

It will also continue to highlight concerns around the use of “community resolutions” where offences by young people are dealt with informally by YOTs and the police enabling the offender to avoid an official caution or criminal record.

An increasing proportion of cases are being handled in this way yet there is no national data on exactly how often this approach is being used and how effective it is, points out Russell.

“It hasn’t been formally evaluated and our inspection findings show the quality of work – particularly the quality of risk assessment and assessment of safety and wellbeing – is significantly worse for these sorts of cases than for statutory cases,” he says.

As well as flagging up areas for improvement, Russell says the inspectorate is keen to showcase effective practice with plans to publish a guide for YOTs this spring featuring examples of good casework.

INSPECTIONS SHORTS

OFSTED
Ofsted has said it plans to return to full inspections of children’s services, schools and early years settings later this year. Routine inspections of local authority children’s services and other social care providers are expected to re-start in April under the plans set out before the latest national lockdown in England was announced. Routine inspections of early years settings, schools and further education colleges – resulting in an inspection grade – are set to resume in the summer. A programme of interim inspections and assurance visits will continue in the meantime.

EDUCATION
Children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) were less likely to be in school with many unable to access the full curriculum even if they were able to attend, according to research by Ofsted. The research, carried out between September and December last year, was based on visits to settings and conversations with education, health and social care practitioners and inspectors. It found professionals working with children with SEND had found the pandemic “personally and professionally difficult” with many going out of their way to provide support to the detriment of their own wellbeing.

SOCIAL CARE
The need for children and young people entering secure children’s homes to self-isolate for 14 days has caused increased anxiety for both children and staff, according to findings from assurance visits by Ofsted. In some cases this resulted in children physically attacking others or self-harming, states the report based on visits to social care providers between September and December 2020. Staff shortages due to Covid-19 also had an impact on children’s feelings of safety at secure facilities, found the report.

CHILDCARE
Childcare providers must now use an online form to notify Ofsted about serious incidents including confirmed cases of Covid-19. From 28 January onwards, childminders, nurseries and other childcare settings will be required to make notifications via the online form and not by phone or email.

YOUTH JUSTICE
Inspectors called for urgent action to stop unacceptable treatment of children in a “bleak regime” at Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre. In a rare move, Ofsted, HM Inspectorate of Prisons and the Care Quality Commission issued an “urgent notification” due to ongoing concerns about the quality of care and leadership at the centre run by private contractor MTC. An inspection in December found children were being locked in their rooms for substantial periods of time with little encouragement to get up in the morning.