News

Alison Miller reports on how the winner of the Community Care Awards 2001 young offenders category works with the fire service to give young offenders a chance to rebuild their lives.

Disaffected young people setting fire to stolen cars, burning rubbish, property and buildings, and making hoax calls, take a heavy toll on the resources of the fire service and the communities where these events take place.

For the young people involved, it often signals the start of a career in crime. Finding a way to get the young people to reassess their behaviour isn't easy, but the Phoenix project - the Community Care Awards 2001 winner in the young offenders category - has been extremely successful in cutting offending rates.

The project is a joint initiative between Sunderland Youth Offending Service and Tyne and Wear Fire Brigade and offers young people the chance to attend an intensive work experience course with the fire service. Its target group is young people - mostly male - between the ages of 10 and 17 who are already offending or at risk of offending.

Vicky Thomas is educational and referral specialist with the Sunderland Youth Offending Service, and referral co-ordinator with the project. "Most young people we work with have set fires in some way and pose a community fire safety risk whether they are making hoax calls or actually setting fires," she says.

The ethos of the project is to stress the positives of working within a disciplined service. "Not only is it a disciplined uniformed service," Thomas says, "but there is a reason for the discipline - young people who have been very resistant to discipline can see the reason behind it. The project tries to make them understand that hoax calls can cost lives and that the consequences of what they may perceive to be trivial offences can be very severe," she adds.

Referrals come from a wide range of agencies including youth offending teams, educational social workers and the local authority, and attendance is voluntary.

The young people are offered a seven-day course within the fire service running over three weeks. It begins with an induction day that gives everyone a chance to meet each other and for the officers to explain how the course works.

The second day is a community reparation day with the Arson Task Force where the fire fighters, the young people and Thomas clean up a part of the neighbourhood that has been blighted by fire-setting. "We all get involved because we strongly believe we shouldn't ask them to do anything we wouldn't do ourselves. We take photographs before and after, and the young people get an amazing sense of achievement," Thomas says. "Many of these kids are used to being told that they are completely useless, and the fire service is very good at recognising the positive things about them."

Next is a five-day course where they work 9am-4pm with the fire service, and here they get a real flavour of what life in the brigade is like. They kick off with some team-building skills and move on to training exercises that include learning how to use breathing apparatus and going into a smoke house to rescue a body; learning how to handle casualties safely; rope skills; first aid; half a day on the aerial platform ladder, and half a day at the sewers complex.

At the end of the course there is a ceremony to which the young people can invite family members. Here, they are presented with their own portfolio with a record of everything they have achieved.

The project's statistics are impressive. It has worked with nearly 100 young people with an 81 per cent attendance rate. Forty-four per cent of those who completed the course have not offended since, and 33 per cent have reduced their offending behaviour.

They are also very proud of their mentoring scheme that involves fire fighters offering to mentor young people who have completed the course. The project intends to use the Community Care award money to train and support more fire fighters to become involved in this work.

- The young offenders category was sponsored by Corvedale Care.