Is the Scaled Approach a Failed Approach?
| Author | Stephen Case,Kevin Haines |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225412461212 |
461212YJJ12310.1177/1473225412461212Youth JusticeHaines and Case
2012
Article
Youth Justice
12(3) 212 –228
© The Author(s) 2012
Is the Scaled Approach a Failed
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Approach?
DOI: 10.1177/1473225412461212
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Kevin Haines and Stephen Case
Abstract
This article evaluates the ‘Scaled Approach’ to youth justice adopted in England and Wales, compared with
the ‘Children First’ approach adopted in Swansea. Using Youth Justice Board reconviction data, comparisons
are made between the performance of the Scaled Approach pilot areas, Children First and all other Youth
Offending Teams in England and Wales. Data indicates wide variability and inconsistency of practice across
Youth Offending Teams, including the pilot areas. The Children First model emerges as a promising method
of reducing reconviction rates, whereas the Scaled Approach (applied assiduously) has unintended negative
consequences. Implications for youth justice assessment policy and practice are discussed.
Keywords
Children First, entitlements, rights, risk, Scaled Approach
Youth justice policy and practice in England and Wales has been shaped over time by
ongoing tensions between the welfare and justice agendas, interspersed with occasional
calls to diversionary and anti-custody objectives. However, a ‘new youth justice’ (Goldson,
2000) emerged following the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 that emphasized managerial-
ism − measuring, monitoring and informing youth justice processes and practices in a
systematic and performance indicator-driven manner. Central to this managerialist move-
ment was the establishment of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales to oversee
and prescribe the work of multi-agency Youth Offending Teams in every local authority
area. The YJB assigned Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) performance targets (e.g. annual
reductions in the proportions of young people entering the Youth Justice System, reoff-
ending and entering custody) and YOT staff were assigned National Standards for their
work (Stephenson et al., 2007).
The over-arching goal of the Youth Justice System (YJS) became the prevention of
offending. Prevention was to be pursued via the ‘Assessment Planning Interventions and
Supervision’ model – which grounded interventions in the results of risk assessments
Corresponding author:
Dr Stephen Case, Centre for Criminal Justice and Criminology, Vivian Tower, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea
SA2 8PP, UK.
Email: s.p.case@swan.ac.uk
Haines and Case
213
conducted on young people in trouble with the law. A specially-commissioned risk
assessment tool known as ‘Asset’ purported to identify the factors in young people’s
lives that are most predictive of their future reoffending and thus the most promising
targets for intervention (see Baker, 2005). On 30 November 2009, the emphasis on risk
culminated in the introduction of the ‘Scaled Approach’ to YOT practice across England
and Wales − an approach which explicitly and directly linked a young person’s asset risk
assessment score to the nature, frequency, intensity and duration of subsequent interven-
tion (Youth Justice Board, 2009; see also Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, 2008;
Sutherland 2009).
Prior to national introduction, the Youth Justice Board (YJB) evaluated a pilot of
the Scaled Approach. The evaluation identified similarities between the pilot YOTs in
how ‘scaled’ risk-focused assessment and intervention processes were implemented.
Pilot YOTs (when compared with the four non-pilot YOTs) demonstrated a higher
likelihood of providing risk information to the courts related to a young person’s risk
of reoffending (more accurately, the risk of reconviction), serious harm and vulnera-
bility and a higher likelihood of having recommendations followed by the courts.
However, a fundamental attribute of the Scaled Approach (arguably its central justifi-
cation) is the claim that structured risk-based assessments lead to structured risk-
focused programmes of intervention, which, in turn, lead to reductions in offending
behaviour. Whilst the YJB’s evaluation identified a ‘broad and clearly defined con-
sensus among the practitioners in the four pilot YOTs that the risk-based approach
results in better outcomes for young people’ (YJB, 2010: 15), their evaluation (due to
restrictions on timing) did not consider the direct impact of the Scaled Approach on
reconviction.
The impact of the implementation of the Scaled Approach on the future (non) offend-
ing behaviour of young people is of critical importance. The Scaled Approach and its
reliance on risk factor research has been much criticized (see Bateman, 2011; Paylor,
2010) and its efficacy in reducing offending has been brought into question. Accordingly,
this article utilizes YJB data generated over the pilot period to evaluate its effectiveness
primarily in terms of its impact on reoffending (measured as reconviction). To broaden
this analysis beyond the reconviction rates of Scaled Approach pilot YOTs, comparisons
are made with all other YOTs in England and Wales. We also take this opportunity to
provide comparisons with a YOT in Wales which has sought to implement a ‘dragonized’
or ‘children first’ approach to youth justice (see Haines, 2010), which is more closely
aligned with Welsh social policy for children and young people, and which offers a dis-
tinctively different approach to that promulgated in the Scaled Approach.
The Developing Context of Youth Justice in Wales
Although a number of policy areas relevant to children and young people have been
devolved to the Welsh Assembly Government since devolution in 1999 (e.g. education,
social services, community safety, health and housing), youth justice remains a non-
devolved area that is centrally managed from Westminster. Whilst ‘English’ youth jus-
tice policy has been much promulgated and the focus of considerable critical academic
214
Youth Justice 12(3)
attention (see, for example, Goldson and Muncie 2006; Smith, 2008; Pitts, 2003; Taylor
et al., 2009; ), ‘Welsh’ youth justice has been less publicized and received compara-
tively little attention (although see Drakeford, 2010; Morgan, 2009).
Central to the devolution debate is the potential for future youth justice policy and
practice in Wales to have an ethos and focus divergent from the dominant risk-led
system. It has been argued that the social policy context for children and young people
in Wales has created the conceptual and practical space for a ‘dragonized’ form1 of
youth justice (Haines 2010; see also Drakeford, 2010; Edwards and Hughes, 2009).
Post-devolution social policies have been distinctive from those in England due to their
focus on enhancing young people’s ability to exercise their universal entitlements/rights
to access to support, services, information and guidance and by placing the responsibil-
ity on adult stakeholders to facilitate this access (Haines, 2010). For example, the
‘Extending Entitlement’ youth inclusion strategy (National Assembly Policy Unit,
2002) outlines a series of universal and unconditional entitlements2 for young people
aged 11−25 years, which apply equally to young people in trouble with the law, whilst
the ‘Getting it Right’ response to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child sets out
seven core aims3 for national social policy. A children’s rights ethos underpins the All
Wales Youth Offending Strategy, a joint Welsh Assembly Government and Youth Justice
Board document (WAG and YJB 2004) articulating the tensions between Welsh social
policy for children and young people (see Haines, 2010) and the more risk-led and
responsibilizing priorities of the English-based Government (see Muncie, 2004) and its
Every Child Matters policy framework (Department for Education and Skills, 2004; see
also Case et al., 2005.4 Whilst the All Wales Youth Offending Strategy reflects the
Crime and Disorder Act’s preventative goal for youth justice, it coalesces with the more
rights-led WAG social policy by asserting that ‘promoting the welfare of children and
young people reduces the risk of offending and reoffending’ and clearly states that
young people who break the law should be ‘treated as children first and offenders
second’ (WAG and YJB, 2004: 3).
The Children First, children’s rights and entitlements-based ethos of Welsh social
policy is indicative of a divergence, at least in policy terms, with the risks and responsi-
bilities foci of English youth justice. The Children First philosophy for youth justice
espoused in the All Wales Youth Offending Strategy was first articulated by Welsh aca-
demics, who maintained that:
The philosophy for youth justice must be to treat all young offenders as children first… dif-
ferently from adults and in a separate manner which recognises the special status accorded to
them because of their youth. (Haines and Drakeford, 1998: 89)
In December 2009, the Report to the Welsh Assembly Government on the Question of
Devolution of Youth Justice Responsibilities by Professor Rod Morgan (former chair of
the YJB) was published. Morgan concluded that a distinctive Welsh youth justice was
emerging and that 'the youth justice service is already the most devolved part of the crim-
inal justice system' (Morgan, 2009: 7). Of particular importance to the analysis of the
distinctiveness of Welsh youth justice is Morgan's conclusion that:
Haines and Case
215
Almost everyone favours the rights-based doctrine...
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