Praise for Youth Offending Team

Since September last year East Sussex County Council's Children's Services Scrutiny Committee has been carrying out a thorough review of youth crime prevention, a new area of work for the YOT, to establish how effective that work has been and the role that partnership has played.

And in a report to the committee the review board has concluded that there are lots of examples of good partnership working and initiatives that have been set up by YOT to prevent young people offending.

However, in recommending improvements to the work, it has found that there are difficulties in gathering information to measure and assess how effective the initiatives are, and improvements need to be made in identifying the most appropriate young people to target, and in making the partnership approach more consistent across the county.

Cllr Brian Gadd, chairman of the committee, said, "The general conclusion of the review board is that communication between the statutory partners in the YOT is generally good and that the work of YOT is well respected.

"There are some really excellent examples of partnership working including the Prevent and Deter groups which have been created by the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships.

"These enable us to work together to identify concerns about particular young people and establish a package of measures to support that person and prevent offending.

"However, we have made some recommendations to improve this work by achieving greater consistency and uniformity across the county, and on gathering evidence to see how effective these preventative schemes actually are."

In its examination of the YOT's crime prevention work, the review board also looked at the work of Youth Justice Workers in schools and colleges, the success of mentoring work being done on a one-to-one basis with young people who have already offended, parenting support schemes, and the restorative justice scheme under which young people face up to the consequences of their behaviour.

Cllr Meg Stroude, lead cabinet member for children and families, said, "This is a very helpful report and really does highlight some of the very positive work being done by the YOT in preventing offending by young people.

"It also helps us to see where we can build on this and make improvements."

The Children's Services scrutiny committee agreed all the recommendations in the review board's report.

This will now be submitted to the council's cabinet for comment and to the council for approval.

A follow-up report will be received by the committee in November 2007 and June 2008 showing how far the recommendations have been progressed.