A young offender leaving secure care meets his social worker on Friday. She rings round various placements advertised in Community Care. The boy gets moved into one of the placements on the Monday. Is this a familiar scenario to anyone?

 This is just one example in a dossier of social service's troubles in placing young offenders being released from secure care. The Secure Accommodation Network, which represents secure homes has produced this, and says vulnerable kids are being badly let down when they are released.

Why is it so difficult to place these kids, and does a quick trawl through the back pages of Community Care truly represent the extent of some social worker's planning efforts?

 In one (of too many) cases in SAN's dossier, 18 months of hard work with one boy in custody was "undone within four weeks" on release...he was placed in a B & B, had reoffended, had no educational placement, and was using illegal drugs with others in the B & B. The result? He was returned to a YOI.

How can this appalling revolving door of custody and crap in the community continue?

Gordon Brown has this week drawn some attention to social care, specifically funding for services for older people. It's taken 10 years or so for the Labour government to put older people on the political agenda, goodness knows how it will take before young offenders are seen as part of social care, not the prison/punishment/crime agenda.

Email Gordon Brown and your local MP with your views.

Have a look at this website, www.stepupsocialcare.co.uk its is a London based private company that works with young people, including those who are leaving secure accommodation.

I remember that the Howard League supported a young person who was in secure accommodation and who remained locked up over the xmas period because the Local Authority did not find accommodation for him to enable early release to take the LA to court. It was Judge Munby, thus called the Munby Judgement and the LA was told that

"The judge found that there was no action plan to meet J's needs for training and employment after leaving prison, nor for support in literacy and innumeracy. In regards to J's homelessness situation the judge reflected that the local authority contented itself with the anodyne observation that the local authority would continue to explore accommodation options in preparation for [his] release."

In short, the planning was hopelessly inadequate and contained little more than vague aspirations; it was little more than worthless." 

One measure of the pathway plan's inadequacies is that one would scarcely realise from reading it just how significant J’s needs and problems are. Another telling indicator is its failure to identify any truly specialist support for him."

The judge found that the local authority had failed to plan in relation to J's health; development, education, training employment, independent living skills and accommodation.

There had been no clear identification of J’s needs, what was to be done about them, by whom or by when.

Duties owed to children leaving custody: the K v - Manchester case

This case establishes some very important details about the ways in which children who are leaving custody should be assessed under the Children Act 1989. It made it clear that assessments under the Act should be carried out by local authority social services departments instead of Youth Offending Team workers and that the assessments should explicitly cover the future needs of the child on release from custody.

Both of the full articles can be found on the Howard League's website.