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The difficulties facing youth offending teams (Yots) in terms of getting young people back into education are not new. But the additional pressure of ambitious Youth Justice Board targets on numbers in full-time education has reinforced the need to keep the issue high on the agenda.

Recent research at Peterborough Youth Offending Service shows the struggle that Yots have with the targets: of the 73 young people studied, almost three-quarters of them had already been excluded from school.

"The difficulty in maintaining a school place for many young offenders can be exacerbated by their criminal behaviour," says research author Zoe Ashmore, a consultant forensic psychologist. "Most incidents of exclusion occurred in year nine and were for abuse, disruptive behaviour, affronts to authority and physical violence to peers."

Once a young person has been excluded for several weeks, it can be harder to make up lost time and easier to increase the risk of disengagement, Ashmore adds.

Yet, despite these odds, the YJB expects Yots to have 90% of offenders in full-time educational places in 2005. When you consider that less than a quarter of the 155 youth offending teams in England and Wales reported they had met the 80% target of March 2003, the size of the task ahead is only too obvious.

One of the main challenges is engaging young offenders, many of whom have become alienated from the system for a variety of reasons.

"The young people we are working with are normally the most disaffected ones who often have an ingrained negative attitude towards education by the time they come to us," explains Justin Davies, education officer at Stockport youth offending team.

Providing alternatives to mainstream education is often seen as a way to support the complex needs of such young people. In 2002, Stockport Council's education services and the local Yot set up the Alternative Curriculum Experience to provide education for local young people whose behaviour made them unsuitable for conventional provision. It offers one-to-one learning support for young people in an environment that is tailored to need and is not delivered within a school setting.

However, as Davies points out, with only five places available at any one time, the service although excellent cannot accommodate all the young people who require it. To make any real impact, there needs to be more resources and funding to offer a number of such placements to young offenders, he adds.

In Lancashire, the youth offending team is developing extensive links between education providers and other agencies to overcome the barriers to education for young people who have become disengaged.

Linking with schools, the team has recently secured funding to enable the implementation of a wide range of restorative approaches within three of them. Education officer Jennifer Martinez says: "These approaches will include mediation, restorative conferencing, circle time and mentoring, which will run alongside and support existing initiatives and are designed to address inappropriate behaviour and conflicts within schools."

Other systems that Lancashire Yot has in place include preventive measures such as the Group Intervention Panel, an early intervention initiative for children and young people at risk of becoming involved in crime or antisocial behaviour. It aims to divert young people away from developing patterns of persistent offending by ensuring that they have access to mainstream services, and one-to-one support from panel staff.

Time for Youth, a programme set up by East Potential, a provider of accommodation, training and employment opportunities for young people in Essex and east London, takes another approach to preventive work. It aims to address the problems which occur when young people are caught in a cycle of homelessness and reoffending by offering a range of support and interventions, including accommodating 335 young people.

But despite all these successful initiatives at a local level, a much more concerted effort by agencies across England and Wales is needed to deal with the challenges around keeping young offenders in education.

Ashmore believes research in this area would help youth offending services to achieve the challenging targets set by the YJB.
"Delivery will require effective partnership work," she adds. "Success, while difficult to achieve, is likely to have a significant impact on reducing offending and help us to better understand how policy and practice must change."

School Projects

Mainstream management

Coping with a mainstream educational place is very challenging for a young person if they have spent some time out of school, and a high level of support should be available for them.  Peter Walker is head teacher at Abbey School in Faversham, Kent. The school doesn't have a traditional pastoral system but instead has non-teachers who are specifically employed to offer emotional and behavioural support to pupils. It also has a counsellor on-site three days a week.   "School staff need to recognise that a young offender being integrated into the school may have a lot of issues to be dealt with and may be at a point where academic learning is difficult," Walker says.  "Support to build self-esteem and confidence is necessary to enable them into a position where education is possible."

Target practice

If successful, preventive programmes targeting groups of children and young people at risk of offending reduce the chances of problems at later stages.

Planning for Success is a programme specifically targeting year 10 children at risk of offending that has been developed by Radhika Bynon, extended school manager at Tom Hood Schol in Leytonstone, London.

Bynon says the focused group structure addresses the attitudes, aspirations and accountability of the pupils who attend.

Though the programme is in its pilot stages, immediate evaluation has shown encouraging results and a girls group is now being organised too.

"We're not in a position where we can say this has worked." says Bynon.  "But we've had very positive feedback from the young people."