Youth offending link to NEETs, school expulsions and SEND is a concern - HM inspector
Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 15 August 2023
Too many young people involved with the youth justice system are not in education or training, are excluded from school and have learning difficulties.
The warning comes from chief inspector of probation for England and Wales Justin Russell who called for more to be done to support this group.
In a foreword to the inspectorate’s annual report on inspections of youth offending services, Russell said the number of recommendations made on this theme in 2022 was over double that of the year before.
He said: “We are still visiting services with higher proportions of older children who are not in any form of education or training after the age of 16.
“We know that young children on YJS [Youth Justice Services] caseloads experience high levels of temporary and permanent exclusion from mainstream education, and when they are in school may often be on very part-time timetables.”
The thematic inspection looked at 181 young people on YJS cases across six local services. It found 64 per cent had been excluded from school.
Almost a third (29 per cent) had been permanently excluded and a quarter were not in any form of education, training or employment.
The study said “it wasn’t unusual” for children to have been out of school for two years or more. One child hadn’t been in school for five years.
“With nothing else to fill their time during school days, and parental supervision often lacking as well, the risks of involvement in criminal exploitation must be massively increased,” said Russell.
Services were found to be failing to support the education needs of children with a disability.
The sample study found 30 per cent of children in youth justice services caseloads were on an education, health and care plan (EHCP) compared to four per cent of all children in England.
Russell said: “Worryingly, this group of EHCP children were receiving the poorest quality of support and supervision from YJS case workers, with insufficient delivery of services in almost half of these cases that we inspected.”
Russell raised concern about the number of young people only identified as having SEND once they were known to youth services. He said: “It’s worrying how many only receive a diagnosis when they enter the youth justice system, and often in their mid-teens.”
He called for “much more robust” monitoring of school attendance and exclusion rates of children on YJS caseloads.
The annual report also highlighted that a “vanishingly small proportion of children involved in the YJS resolved via courts or police cautions.
Instead, children are increasingly being dealt with under more informal community resolutions or an Outcome 22 – a police code deferring prosecution if a child engages with “diversionary activity”.
In 2021/22, 13,800 children received a sentence or police caution across the whole of England and Wales compared with almost 70,000 ten years ago, according to the Youth Annual Report 2022, published by the HM Inspectorate.
Russell blamed Covid-19 for the shift, adding the pandemic had caused services to "radically adapt their delivery model overnight".
He repeated calls for better collection of data to evaluate the effectiveness of out-of-court disposals.
The report also found the total number of cases coming through youth courts was down by 50 per cent in the year ending March 2022, and police cautions fell 52 per cent on the previous year.
The average youth custodial population fell 49 per cent.