Youth Justice News
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225420985092 |
| Author | Tim Bateman |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | News |
985092YJJ0010.1177/1473225420985092Youth JusticeBateman
research-article2021
News
Youth Justice
2021, Vol. 21(1) 139 –149
Youth Justice News
© The Author(s) 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1473225420985092
DOI: 10.1177/1473225420985092
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Tim Bateman
More Than One in Four Children Subject to a Youth Justice
Court Disposal in England and Wales Are in the Care of the
Local Authority
In England and Wales, youth offending teams (YOTs), the statutory multi-agency partner-
ships with responsibility for providing services to children subject to youth justice inter-
ventions, are inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation. The Inspectorate’s
Annual Report, published in November 2020, summarises the outcome of those inspec-
tions and indicates that children in care are substantially over-represented among those
subject to formal youth justice disposals.
On 31 March 2019, 78,150 children were looked after by the local authority in England
(Wales has devolved responsibility for children’s services and Welsh children are accord-
ingly not included in the data), a rate of 65 per 10,000 children in the population, or 0.65
per cent. By contrast, according to the Probation inspectorate, in the 24,000 cases exam-
ined in 2018/2019 of children given a caution or subject to a court order, an estimated
4500 (approaching 19 per cent) were children in care. Although figures are not directly
comparable, it would appear too that over-representation rises in line with the level of
youth justice intervention. Thus, 26 per cent of cases inspected, over the past 2 years, of
children subject to a court disposal (that is omitting those given a pre-court disposal),
were ‘in the care of the local authority at some point during their sentence’. Surveys of
children detained in young offender institutions (YOIs) and secure training centres (STCs)
during 2018/2019 (children in secure children’s homes (SCHs), the third type of custodial
establishment are not included in the data) found that more than half (52 per cent) reported
having been in care at some point in their lives.
The Probation Inspectorate also found that the quality of provision to children in care
by YOTs was, on average, of a lower standard than that given to their non-care counter-
parts. Moreover, as shown in Table 1, where looked-after children were placed outside of
their local authority area, the quality of services was further diminished. For that group of
cases, planning, delivery and review of interventions were all assessed as requiring
improvement on aggregate.
Corresponding author:
Tim Bateman, School of Applied Social Studies, University of Bedfordshire, University Square, Luton LU1 3JU, UK.
Email: tim.bateman@beds.ac.uk
140
Youth Justice 21(1)
Table 1. Aggregate inspection ratings, 2018/2019 and 2019/2020, by care status and area of placement
(1253 court cases across 42 youth offending teams).
Assessment
Planning
Delivery
Reviewing
Children not in care
Good
Good
Good
Good
Children in care placed within
Good
Requires
Good
Requires
local authority
improvement
improvement
Children in care placed outside
Good
Requires
Requires
Requires
local authority
improvement
improvement
improvement
A report, published in November 2020, by the Children’s Commissioner for England
highlighted the extent of ‘out of area’ placements, indicating that more than 30,000 chil-
dren in care are placed outside their own local authority at any one time. This figure
includes 2000 children who are placed more than 100 miles from home. Moreover, out-
of-authority placements are growing more rapidly than the overall increase in care:
between 2014 and 2018, there was an 18 per cent rise in the number of children placed
more than 50 miles from their home local authority, nearly twice the rate of increase for
the total number of children in care over the same period. Children in this particularly
vulnerable group are, for the most part, accommodated in the growing number of private-
sector residential homes, posing additional challenges to high quality provision of ser-
vices as a consequence of the ‘fragmented, uncoordinated and irrational market that
ultimately does not meet the needs of children’.
In this context, co-ordinated planning for ‘dual status’ children – those who are both in
care and subject to youth justice intervention – is particularly important. It is accordingly
disappointing that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation found that part of the reason
for differentials in the quality of provision for looked-after children and those not in care
was that working relationships between YOTs and children’s services were often incon-
sistent or ineffective, despite both services being located within the local authority.
Respective roles and responsibilities, where a child was in care, were not always suf-
ficiently clear; the vulnerability of children who had offended was not always recognised;
and youth justice staff did not, as a matter of routine, attend strategy meetings and child
care reviews. As a consequence, joint planning was often poor and lacking in consistency
leading to a situation where the quality of service to children in care was, on the whole,
unfavourable by comparison with that for children not in care and ‘was particularly weak
for children placed in accommodation outside their local area’.
Where children in care were placed in a residential home outside of the local authority
area, it was common for the ‘home’ YOT to ask the ‘host’ YOT covering the area where
the child was residing, to undertake the programme of supervision on their behalf. Such
an arrangement was understandable prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, given
the difficulties associated with maintaining face-to-face contact at a distance. However,
the Inspectorate found that such practice had persisted beyond the start of the pandemic,
and the introduction of lockdown, when youth justice contacts were increasingly under-
taken remotely, via telephone or other forms of technology. The rationale for asking for
assistance from the host authority was thus less clear. In such circumstances, YOTs were
missing an opportunity to provide elements of continuity for this particularly vulnerable
Bateman
141
group of looked-after children placed out of their own area. Future planning, the report
suggests, should draw on the lessons learned from the changes to service delivery neces-
sitated by the impact of coronavirus.
The report also highlights the changing role of YOTs as a consequence of a policy shift
towards diverting children from prosecution for less serious offending. Where this results
in a formal caution, the police are required to make a referral to the YOT but informal
responses, in the form of ‘community resolutions’ that are not subject to a statutory frame-
work, have increasingly tended to take the place of formal out of court disposals. The
Inspectorate notes that is a ‘wide variation in the policies and processes’ that govern such
outcomes and determine what form of services children are offered, which have devel-
oped piecemeal amid ‘a vacuum of national guidance and evaluation’. This lack of con-
sistency had led to something of a ‘post code lottery’: for instance, in some areas, there
was no limit to the number of community resolutions that could be given to a single child;
in others, there was a strict limit of one such disposal for each...
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