YJB Effective Practice update - Winners of first YJB Evidence Awards | Call for Practice

Call for practice on child development and psychology

The YJB is calling for practice in relation to child development and psychology - the highest-rated effective practice priority emerging from the 2012 Effective Practice Prioritisation Exercise.  Youth justice services and other organisations working in the youth justice system with examples of practice relevant to this theme can submit their examples to the YJB's Effective Practice Team.  Information on how to do so can be found here. The call for practice is the second stage in the YJB's Effective Practice Cycle, and assists us in progressing this work with an informed view of current practice across the sector.

Winners of first YJB Evidence Awards announced

Many congratulations to Southwark Youth Offending Team (YOT) and St Giles Trust SOS Project who were announced as deserving winners of the first YJB evidence competition at an event in London on 10 June.

The competition was open to statutory and voluntary youth justice services, and the awards were in recognition of the high quality of evaluation which the St Giles Trust and Southwark YOT have produced for their interventions.

Both organisations received £5,000 to develop their evaluation practice.

The Southwark YOT’s Knife Crime Prevention Programme targets 10 to 17-year-olds convicted of a knife-enabled offence. Its key purpose is to help young people understand the consequences to themselves and others of carrying and using knives, thereby reducing the likelihood of knife-enabled reoffending. The project uses a pre- and post-evaluation methodology and measures changes in "risk" scores to assess its effect on young people. The project wants to use the award to set up a matched comparison group and to look in more detail at why the programme works for some participants and not others.

The St Giles Trust SOS Project helps young people in London break free from cycles of gang involvement, serious youth violence and crime. It uses a range of objective (hard) and subjective (soft) data sources to assess the status of gang members. The project also tracks gang membership through self-reported data, its own assessments, and using offending data. The St Giles Trust SOS Project plans to use the award to improve its case management system and data collection tools, and further train its staff in the process of collecting and analysing data.

We are planning to run a further competition this year in recognition of some of the excellent work we know is being done in the sector. We will post details of this competition in due course via these updates.

For more information about any of the items in this update, please email the YJB Effective Practice Team.