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Tragic deaths in custody point to a system in need of reform

    Opinion
  • Tuesday, May 3, 2011
  • | CYP Now
Five young people in custody died in the space of just 33 days during March and April. The tragedies mark an exceptionally horrific spell in the youth prison system. To put it in context, no more than five teenagers have died in custody during any entire year since 2005, when the figure was nine.

Editorial: A backward step for youth justice

    Opinion
  • Monday, May 24, 2010
  • | CYP Now
The new government's decision to give the Ministry of Justice sole responsibility for youth justice in England and Wales is massively misguided. It ends a three-year spell where responsibility was shared with the former Department for Children, Schools and Families. During that time, as it happens, the youth prison population declined from 2,927 in March 2007 to 2,207 in March 2010.

Progress in joint working must go on

    Opinion
  • Monday, November 22, 2010
  • | CYP Now
The decision last week to strip the Children's Workforce Development Council (CWDC) of government funding will inevitably raise concerns that any genuine "development" of the workforce will stall. A plan for how the Department for Education intends to take forward the quango's work is yet to be articulated.

Riot response requires long-term solutions, not knee-jerk policies

    Opinion
  • Monday, August 22, 2011
  • | CYP Now
The violence across English cities this month triggered its own riot - of condemnation, debate and knee-jerk policy pronouncements. In the days that followed the first outbreak in Tottenham, an exercise in national soul searching took place through the media. Yours truly, for one, did the breakfast TV paper review on Sky News.

It's time to respect children's rights

    Opinion
  • Tuesday, November 17, 2009
  • | CYP Now
You wait ages for one 20th anniversary, then three come along at once. We've just marked the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1989 Children Act. And this week it is 20 years since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child came into existence.

The next commissioner needs bite

    Opinion
  • Tuesday, June 16, 2009
  • | CYP Now
The Department for Children, Schools and Families has fired the starting gun to recruit a children's commissioner for England to succeed Sir Al Aynsley-Green early next year.

Hidden costs of payment-by-results

    Opinion
  • Monday, July 5, 2010
  • | CYP Now
We are in an age of austerity where outcomes are critical. So it is difficult to take issue in raw principle with the government's desire to commission more public services on a payment-by-results basis.

Abolition of YJB is difficult to justify

    Opinion
  • Monday, October 18, 2010
  • | CYP Now
The government's decision to scrap the Youth Justice Board (YJB) in last week's "bonfire of the quangos" is bewildering. In recent years, since the welcome demise of New Labour's Respect agenda, the YJB has helped to reduce first-time entrants to the criminal justice system and the youth custody population has come down.

Prevention, not detention, must come first

    Opinion
  • Tuesday, September 11, 2007
  • | CYP Now
Children's Secretary Ed Balls last week told CYP Now that he wants to "strengthen the role the youth justice system can play in preventing youth crime." His words were welcome. But they need to be backed up with action.

Cost of custody should be devolved

    Opinion
  • Tuesday, May 26, 2009
  • | CYP Now
The current system of placing children in prison operates under a perverse financial incentive. Local authorities, which are responsible for a range of prevention and early intervention work to divert the young from crime, are essentially rewarded for their failures. If children are sentenced to custody, they no longer pick up the tab for their welfare.

Focus of spending must be balanced

    Opinion
  • Tuesday, September 8, 2009
  • | CYP Now
It's official: the UK spends more money on child welfare and education than the average market economy. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report out last week, we spend just over 90,000 per child from birth to 18 compared to an OECD average among 30 member countries of just under 80,000.

Outstanding challenge for Ofsted

    Opinion
  • Monday, February 1, 2010
  • | CYP Now
Ofsted-bashing has been on the rise for several months. Cries of exasperation over the way the children's services inspectorate goes about its business have come in fits and starts from all quarters.

Young people in custody matter too

    Opinion
  • Tuesday, September 1, 2009
  • | CYP Now
A government-commissioned review into the use of restraint in the youth prison system reported last December that force must be used as a "last resort".

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