Since September last year East Sussex County Council’s Children’s Services Scrutiny Committee has been carrying out a thorough review of youth crime prevention, a new area of work for the YOT, to establish how effective that work has been and the role that partnership has played.
And in a report to the committee the review board has concluded that there are lots of examples of good partnership working and initiatives that have been set up by YOT to prevent young people offending.
However, in recommending improvements to the work, it has found that there are difficulties in gathering information to measure and assess how effective the initiatives are, and improvements need to be made in identifying the most appropriate young people to target, and in making the partnership approach more consistent across the county.
Councillor Brian Gadd, Chairman of the Committee said: “The general conclusion of the review board is that communication between the statutory partners in the YOT is generally good and that the work of YOT is well respected.
“There are some really excellent examples of partnership working including the Prevent and Deter groups which have been created by the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships. These enable us to work together to identify concerns about particular young people and establish a package of measures to support that person and prevent offending.
“However, we have made some recommendations to improve this work by achieving greater consistency and uniformity across the county, and on gathering evidence to see how effective these preventative schemes actually are.”
In its examination of the YOT’s crime prevention work the review board also looked at the work of Youth Justice Workers in schools and colleges, the success of mentoring work being done on a one-to-one basis with young people who have already offended, parenting support schemes, and the restorative justice scheme under which young people face up to the consequences of their behaviour.
Councillor Meg Stroude, Lead Cabinet Member for Children and Families said: “This is a very helpful report and really does highlight some of the very positive work being done by the YOT in preventing offending by young people. It also helps us to see where we can build on this and make improvements.”
The Children’s Services Scrutiny Committee agreed all the recommendations in the review board's report. This will now be submitted to the council’s Cabinet for comment and to the Council for approval. A follow up report will be received by the committee in November 2007 and June 2008 showing how far the recommendations have been progressed.
Notes to editors
For full details of the work of the review team and the report agreed by the Children’s Services Scrutiny Committee please see agenda item five for Scrutiny Committee for Children's Services, 14 March 2007.
The Youth Offending Team is a multi-agency team which includes four statutory partners: the county council, police, probation service and health service. The East Sussex YOT was established in 2000 and it sits within the Children’s Services Department at East Sussex County Council. It has a total of 59 staff including some seconded from the statutory partners, and is supported by a large team of volunteers.
The YOT has number of statutory duties (see link above which includes background) and although youth crime prevention falls outside of its core statutory role, this is an area where it is focussing an increased amount of time and resources.
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