Local partnerships are key to improving children's outcomes
Alison Sabaroche, the Head of Service at Hammersmith and Fulham Youth Justice Service, discusses her area's successful approach to youth justice.
The team at Hammersmith and Fulham Youth Justice Service.
For years, Hammersmith and Fulham’s Youth Justice Service (YJS) was part of a Tri-borough service but in 2018, the Tri-borough was dissolved, and the YJS became a sovereign service. According to Alison Sabaroche, who started as a service manager and is now the head of the YJS, this change made a big difference.
The service now has its own identity, its own management board, and a closer working relationship with Hammersmith and Fulham’s Children and Young People Services.
Alison notes that the change also made it easier to focus on the specific issues facing Hammersmith and Fulham’s children and families. For example, despite a small population of children and young adults, there has also been a high incidence of serious violence in the area. Something that may not be what people typically associate with the borough. Hammersmith and Fulham’s Council has invested heavily in addressing this issue, creating a Gangs Violence and Exploitation Unit to help identify and support children at risk of becoming involved in gang activity or exploitation.
While the challenges faced by the YJS may not be unique, they are significant. The service has a high incidence of children with special educational needs and a small cohort, which means that these children feature quite prominently in the statistics. Despite these challenges, Alison is optimistic about the future of the service, which she sees as having a stronger identity and a more focused approach to addressing the needs of the children in the borough.
Responding to local data
Alison explained that they have used their data to identify which children are most likely to end up in the youth justice system. For Hammersmith and Fulham, these children are most likely to be Black, come from the north of the borough, be aged between 15-17, and have either an undiagnosed or unmet learning need or special educational need. Armed with this information, the service collaborated with their management board to create opportunities to invest into staff and activities that will prevent these children from coming into the youth justice system. They built a health and wellbeing team that included speech and language therapists, an educational psychologist, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) workers, youth justice liaison and diversion, systemic family therapists, and even a school nurse – who works collaboratively with youth justice practitioners.
The health and wellbeing team is focussed on screening, identifying and assessing all the children as part of their initial assessment process. As Alison says, “our children, if they’re coming to us with any need, it’s going to be picked up, it’s going to be supported”. The service has set local targets, and, for example, they have seen a significant increase in the number of Black and Mixed heritage boys engaged in education, training, and employment at the end of their intervention.
Working with the local community
But it’s not just about intervention, as Alison emphasised. They also want to help these children become upstanding members of the community. And so, they focused on partnering with organisations in the community, such as Queens Park Rangers (QPR), where two seconded workers are currently working with the youth justice team. The children can access all the programs that the charitable trust runs, from education through to football coaching. The goal is to link them to something rooted in their community and offer training, education and employment opportunities, which has been successful in encouraging them to pursue football coaching and even work for QPR.
Every year they hold an annual consultation with the children to capture the voice of the child. It is held at QPR, with the offer of a tour of the stadium for the children and their families. This and other activities all help to boost participation. An important part of this is for the service to demonstrate how it has acted on this feedback. So, for example, two years back-to-back, the children requested mentors. The service recognised the value in children having a relationship with someone who’s not bound by the statutory side of things. Someone who has the flexibility to do more intense work with the children. So, working with QPR, they set up additional support like someone who can knock at their house every morning to, for example, encourage them to be ready for school, or home tutors to support children with their literacy and numeracy.
By investing in its resources, identify their children’s needs, and working closely with the community, the service is able to provide opportunities for its children to thrive.
This focus on understanding the children they work with was praised when HMI Probation inspected the service last year. Hammersmith and Fulham was awarded an ‘outstanding’ and Chief Inspector of Probation Justin Russell said: “We were impressed with how staff at the service work with children under their supervision, and their parents or carers, to understand their circumstances and drive them toward positive futures.”
Being Child First
For Alison, it all comes down to seeing children as children and ‘not just being focused on the youth justice side of things’. One of her priorities was about using caring and compassionate language. As a first step, the service changed its name from youth offending team to youth justice service and has been promoting that widely. As Alison says, “there’s something about taking out ‘offending’ that helps you know and make sure that we’re talking about children, it’s children who happen to have offended, not ‘young offenders’”.
Also, in the spirit of Child First evidence the service has given the format of its pre-sentence reports an overhaul. The opening section of the report is now about the child. Their story comes first, and the offences are discussed later. This is important because it immediately sets the context for the magistrate or district judge. The service asked for feedback on these changes and were delighted with the results. “We did a report on a child who had committed harmful sexual behaviour offences and the feedback from the district judge was ‘this is an exemplar report, it really helped me to understand the child’”. When the reports were presented in this manner, the service discovered that they improved the consistency between their proposals and the decisions made by the magistrates.
“We always say we’re here planting seeds. Sometimes you might see the green shoots, but sometimes you won’t know that that seed has grown into an oak tree until long after.”
Of course, this work isn’t always easy to measure. As Alison notes, sometimes staff won’t know the full impact of their efforts until long after. “That’s our job,” she says. “We always say we’re here planting seeds. Sometimes you might see the green shoots, but sometimes you won’t know that that seed has grown into an oak tree until long after.”