Youth Justice News (22.3)
| Author | Tim Bateman |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14732254221129913 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Legal Commentary |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14732254221129913
Youth Justice
2022, Vol. 22(3) 349 –360
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14732254221129913
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Youth Justice News
Tim Bateman
Youth Justice Assessments of Children Subject to Statutory
Court Orders in England and Wales Take, on Average, Over
15 Hours to Complete
The Youth Justice Board for England and Wales was established, by the Crime and
Disorder Act 1997, as a non-departmental public body to oversee the operation of the
youth justice system. One of the Board’s most significant initiatives was the development,
and subsequent national roll-out from April 2000, of a standardised, mandatory, assess-
ment tool, called ASSET, which youth offending teams were obliged to complete for all
children subject to court orders or statutory pre-court interventions. ASSET was an actu-
arial instrument which required practitioners to ascribe scores to individual children
across 12 domains of risk. While it also aimed to identify protective factors, the latter
were not subject to scoring. Where risks were identified as contributory to the child’s
offending behaviour, supervision planning was expected to address those factors. With the
onset of, what was known as, the ‘scaled approach’, introduced by the Youth Justice Board
in 2009, levels and frequently of interventions were also to be determined by the total
‘risk of reoffending score’ aggregated from the different ASSET domains.
The risk factor prevention paradigm, in which ASSET was firmly rooted, was increas-
ingly subject to criticism. At the same time, the growing influence of desistance theory,
which focused on the processes through which children give up offending rather than
identifying past risks which might help to explain their criminal behaviour, led to a grow-
ing recognition that ASSET was unduly deficit focused, limited practitioner discretion
and tended to ignore the perspectives of children themselves.
The Youth Justice Board accordingly developed a new assessment framework,
AssetPlus, which was designed to address some of the criticisms of ASSET. The revised
tool was intended to allow risk ‘to be balanced alongside consideration of a young per-
son’s needs, goals and strengths’ and aimed to encourage practitioners to identify
Corresponding author:
Tim Bateman, Institute of Applied Social Research, University of Bedfordshire, University Square, Luton LU1 3JU UK.
Email: tim.bateman@ntlworld.com
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