Last summer, the city of Nottingham set up seven panels to identify children at high risk of turning to crime who could be offered help to keep them on the straight and narrow.
Called Early Warning and Tracking Panels, they include local education welfare officers , police, probation officers and representatives of health and social services. They meet every two months to suggest names and share their knowledge of the children and their family and circumstances. High-priority cases are passed on to the local youth offending team. Most are 12 to 14. One is nine. Specialists from the team visit the family to see if parents and child are happy to co-operate. The family will be told that the child’s behaviour is causing concern and that, without intervention, he is considered likely to end up in court.
Few refuse. “Out of 330 we’ve approached so far, there are probably only 30 cases where the family have declined to be involved,” says Kevin Dennis , deputy manager of Nottingham youth offending team (YOT) and a former youth and community worker. Families are crying out for support, says Mr Dennis. Indeed, desperate parents sometimes refer their own children for help. “They’re worried about who their kids are hanging around with, they’re nicking money from home, verbally abusing their parents. They’ve tried sanctions and nothing has worked.”
Behaviour problems in school alone are not enough to warrant referral to the youth offending team. The panels look for other risk factors too, such as living in a high-crime neighbourhood, having a family member involved with crime, or a family history of drugs or abuse.
But the team will need to address an educational problem in every case: low attainment, poor attendance, or exclusion. The team may offer help ranging from personal tuition to an 18-week literacy and numeracy project at the Nottingham Forest FC study centre. The potential offender may also get help from the team’s drugs or mental health specialists and mentoring. Parents needing help can follow a special programme run three times a year.
Another high priority is to get the young person involved in local youth activities. “A lot of these young people are not involved with any form of positive social or recreational activity,” says Mr Dennis. Last year and this, Nottingham has run an activity programme in the holidays for the young people referred.
The original target for the scheme, which started just eight months ago, was to help 400 young people a year based on an intervention programme lasting an average of three months. But the aim now is to target fewer for more intensive work. Multiple problems take more than three months to resolve.
