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Would you welcome the prospect of having a young offender come to live with you for £24,000 a year? If you have exceptional personal skills and a background in dealing with challenging young people, you might be just the kind of person the government is looking for.

Extending the use of highly supervised and supported placements for persistent young offenders on bail is one the proposals put forward in the recent white paper Justice for All.¹ However, recruiting suitable foster carers is a problem.

Jane Scott is head of service at Coram Family's Fostering New Links project, which specialises in fostering for the most challenging young people. She says: "It's hugely difficult to recruit people. We run a continual recruitment programme and invest an enormous amount of our budget in advertising."

The exceptionally demanding nature of the work requires people with specialist skills. Many of the foster carers at Fostering New Links have a background in teaching or social work, and the service also gets enquiries from ex-policemen and from magistrates. Scott says: "We ask for at least two years' experience of working with challenging behaviour in adolescents. We interpret that broadly. It could be in the extended family or friendship network, or through private fostering."

Foster carers are paid a fee of about £24,000 a year, plus a £120 a week allowance to cover food, education, leisure, travel, clothing and so on.

Given the recruitment crisis facing the caring professions, including fostering, and the resource constraints on social services, one might question whether the government has understood the implications. Scott says: "It's a brilliant way forward as an alternative to custody, but it needs a huge amount of investment and support. The government needs to think about how local authorities will fund and support it."

Foster carers at Fostering New Links have access to 24-hour support, including calling out a support worker for an emergency consultation. Scott explains: "There's always a social worker at the end of the phone. The work is hugely draining emotionally. People can get caught up with the dynamics associated with severe neglect and abuse. We have support structures to care for staff and to release them if necessary, so the young person goes to another family for respite."

Another distinguishing feature of the service is the intensive support offered to enable young people to attend mainstream school. Fostering New Links employs teachers to work with young people fostered through the project while they are at school. This may involve one-to-one work with the young person in the classroom, as well as teaching the class while the class teacher works with a small group, including the young person being fostered.

Scott says: "Offending behaviour tends to escalate if you put someone in a setting with other young people with similar problems. From the beginning we set up a situation where the person is able to attend mainstream school. Peer support is very important. They learn to measure their behaviour against the average. It's resource intensive but we have a big success rate."

The project offers parenting support to the relative who is caring for the child and is closest to them, as well as intensive social work support to the young person. It also ensures access to mental health services where appropriate and provides leisure activities during school holidays.

Fostering New Links charges £1,800 a week to local authorities using the service, almost twice the cost of a young offenders' institution. Scott says this underestimates the true cost because Coram Family contributes voluntary income on top. "It's not a cheap option. A project like this requires sustained investment. You can't set it up in six months. It's taken us three-and-a-half years to set up properly."

Schemes like this, which aim to help the young person tackle their offending behaviour and other personal difficulties while supporting them in the community, are widely supported by both child care and crime prevention experts. There is a consensus that custody is profoundly damaging for young people and serves to increase the likelihood that they will re-offend on release. For all forms of custodial sentences, the re-conviction rate is around 80 to 90 per cent within two years.


Despite the government's professed intention of preventing youth crime, the UK has one of the worst records in Europe in holding young people in custody. And the numbers of juveniles remanded in custody is still rising - by 6 per cent last year, including a 42 per cent rise in the number of girls held, despite no corresponding increase in youth crime.

As John Coleman, director of the Trust for the Study of Adolescence points out, many of these young people are charged with relatively trivial offences such as shop lifting or non-payment of fines, and are not a danger to the public or to themselves. He says: "Any way we can find to reduce the use of custody is to be welcomed. Remand fostering is a good way forward, as long as sufficient resources are put into it."

However, as with other apparently progressive measures for responding to young offenders, there are concerns that an increase in the availability of remand fostering may serve to draw more young people into the net rather than being used as a positive alternative for young people who would otherwise be in prison.

For example, there is evidence that magistrates are using the new Detention and Training Order for young people who should not be in custody because they are attracted by the post-custody rehabilitation programme.

Similar worries apply to the Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme, which combines training and community-based support with a home curfew enforced with electronic tagging. As Chris Stanley, head of youth crime at rehabilitation agency Nacro, points out: "The response should be proportional to the severity of the offence. The danger with all these new initiatives is that if something is out there it has to be used."

Stanley acknowledges that a lack of suitable accommodation for challenging young people is often a contributory factor in offending, and makes it more likely that a magistrate will choose custody. "If someone doesn't have accommodation, offending is likely to escalate. Often it's because parents won't have them back home." Magistrates are more likely to agree to bail if they see that a young person has suitable accommodation, yet there are few bail hostels for young people and children's homes may not be right for them.

Another welcome proposal in the white paper is to offer more parenting classes for the 25 per cent of young offenders in custody who are parents or about to become parents. The government is anxious to try to break the problem of inter-generational offending, which shows that young people with a criminal parent are four-and-a-half times more likely to offend themselves.

Coleman endorses the proposal. He says: "Bad parenting is a major risk factor for crime. All the studies show that young men make good use of parenting training."

Another welcome government proposal is to wipe clean the criminal records of most young people after they have completed their sentence, making it easier for them to get a job - undoubtedly one of the best ways of keeping them out of trouble and giving them a stake in the future.

Despite supporting these initiatives, Nacro would like to see a wholesale review of the youth justice system, rather than the piecemeal and at times knee-jerk approach adopted by the government. Prevention outside the criminal justice system should be the cornerstone of the policy.

Stanley says: "Up to 90 per cent of juveniles in young offenders institutions have a mental health problem or learning difficulty. We need to focus on what reduces crime, not on punishment."

¹ Home Office, Justice for All, The Stationery Office, July 2002 from www.cjsonline.org