England and Wales are once again asking difficult questions about youth custody. Under the Starmer Government, ministers have been developing what they have described as the biggest reforms to youth justice in a generation, including a new Youth Custody Transformation Plan, have renewed debate about who ends up in custody, what alternatives exist, and what kind of system is most likely to reduce harm.
Scotland has already confronted those questions. Over the past decade, Scotland has reduced children's use of custody to historic lows, alongside a wider shift away from formal justice responses for children. At a recent Centre for Justice Innovation ministerial roundtable, Fiona Duncan, Chair of The Promise Scotland, and Ranald McTaggart, Deputy Director of the Children and Young People's Centre for Justice, reflected on how that change happened and, crucially, what England and Wales can learn from it.
The conversation made clear that Scotland's success is not simply a story of custody reform. It is the result of a much broader change in how agencies across the system understand children who offend: moving away from seeing them primarily through the lens of risk and punishment and towards seeing them first as children with rights, needs, relationships and the capacity to change. That shift has influenced decisions long before a child reaches the point of custody.
There is no suggestion that Scotland has ignored accountability, victims or public safety. Rather, the question has become what response is most likely to help a child understand the harm they have caused, reduce the risk of further offending and achieve better outcomes for children, victims and communities alike.
If England and Wales want fewer children in custody, the question is not simply how to reform custody itself, but why children reach custody in the first place. Scotland's experience suggests that the answer lies well beyond the walls of the secure estate.
Start with the child, not the justice system.
Scotland did not reduce children's involvement in custody by focusing first on the secure estate. Instead, it reshaped the way agencies worked together long before a child reached the justice system. Through reforms including Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) and the Whole System Approach, building on the long-established Children's Hearings System, Scotland developed a shared framework for understanding children's needs, moving away from responding only to their needs and towards coordinating support and avoiding unnecessary involvement in the formal justice system whenever possible. GIRFEC provides an approach for identifying children's needs across education, health, social care, policing and other services, while the Whole System Approach promotes early and effective intervention, diversion from prosecution, alternatives to custody and support on release. Together, they encourage agencies to see children first through the lens of their wellbeing and development, rather than starting with the offence they have committed. In practice, this change has transformed decision-making across the system. Rather than children being passed between services operating to different priorities, Scotland's reforms have encouraged a shared understanding of children's needs, clearer multi-agency accountability and earlier, more coordinated intervention.
England and Wales already have many of the same services, but not the same shared framework. Responsibility for children at risk of entering custody remains spread across youth justice, children's social care, education, health and safeguarding, often operating to different priorities and under separate accountability structures. While England and Wales has begun to shift towards a more child-centred approach through the Youth Justice Board's Child First guiding principle, Scotland's experience suggests that achieving a genuinely whole-child approach requires that way of thinking to extend beyond youth justice and be shared consistently across the wider system. Recent reforms, including Families First for Children and the pre-mentioned Youth Custody Transformation Plan, create an opportunity to strengthen this joined-up approach, but Scotland's experience suggests that reducing custody depends on more than improving individual services. It requires a shared understanding across agencies of how children should be supported before they reach the point of crisis. That ambition also needs to be replicated at the top of government. Youth justice sits with the Ministry of Justice; children's social care and safeguarding sit with the Department for Education. It is difficult to see how agencies on the ground can sustain a whole-child approach when the departments setting their priorities are themselves organised around separate remits: welfare on one side, crime response on the other.
Reducing children's involvement in custody, then, starts long before a child appears in court. It starts with whether the agencies around that child are working towards the same goal.
A shared national story can change practice.
In Scotland, the Independent Care Review was more than a review. Its final report, The Promise, became a shared national commitment that aligned agencies around a common purpose. That made difficult reforms possible because people across government and public services were working towards the same objective.
Drawing on more than 5,500 experiences from care-experienced children and adults, families, and the paid and unpaid workforce, The Promise set out a vision in which every child grows up loved, safe and respected1. While rooted in the experiences of care-experienced children, its influence has extended far beyond children's social care, shaping reform across children's services and providing a clear direction of travel for how Scotland supports children and families. That shared ambition helped create the conditions for agencies to work together towards long-term reform, even when the practical challenges were significant.
The Promise holds great significance for youth justice, as it highlights the disproportionate representation of care-experienced children in the justice system. It gave agencies a common ambition to return to when difficult decisions arose or priorities competed. Rather than asking what was best for an individual service or department, it encouraged organisations to ask what was best for the child.
England and Wales cannot simply replicate The Promise. Scotland's legal, political and institutional context is different. But the lesson is not to copy the model; it is to recognise the value of a shared national ambition. The Ministry of Justice cannot solely reduce children's involvement in custody. It depends on decisions made every day across children's social care, education, health, safeguarding, policing, local government and the courts.
Without that shared ambition, youth justice risks attempting to solve problems created elsewhere in the system. Scotland's experience suggests that lasting reform is far more likely when every agency works towards the same vision for children.
Diversion is not the absence of accountability.
Scotland's approach to diversion was not driven by a belief that children should face fewer consequences for offending. It was driven by evidence about what is most likely to reduce future offending and improve outcomes.
A key influence was the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, which followed a cohort of young people over more than a decade. Its findings challenged long-held assumptions about formal justice intervention. Rather than preventing offending, unnecessary criminalisation and repeated contact with the justice system could reinforce offending by disrupting education, relationships and opportunities, while increasing the likelihood that children become further embedded in the system.
That evidence changed the conversation. Instead of asking whether children deserved to be diverted, policymakers increasingly asked which response was most likely to reduce harm and support long-term desistance. Diversion became an evidence-led intervention, not a softer alternative to prosecution. Accountability remained central, but it was delivered in ways that were more proportionate and more likely to help children understand the harm they had caused, repair relationships and avoid further offending.
This remains an important challenge for England and Wales. Debate about diversion is too often framed as a choice between being "tough" or "soft" on crime. Scotland's experience suggests that framing the issue as a choice between "tough" or "soft" on crime is the wrong approach. The more important question is which response is most likely to reduce future offending, protect victims and improve long-term outcomes. This is a lesson reflected in the Centre for Justice Innovation's own work on youth diversion outcomes. Instead, diversion should be understood as a constructive intervention that combines accountability with support while allowing the justice system to focus its resources where they can have the greatest impact.
Practice can move before legislation.
Scotland's experience also challenges another common assumption: that meaningful reform begins with legislation. In reality, many of the changes that reduced children's involvement in custody were already taking shape through changes in practice, leadership and multi-agency working before they were written into law.
The Whole System Approach, GIRFEC and The Promise had already reshaped how agencies worked with children and how decisions were made across the system. The Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Act 2024 built on that progress by ending the use of Young Offender Institutions for children and reinforcing the move towards secure care for those who need to be deprived of their liberty. The legislation was an important milestone, but it consolidated a direction of travel that was already well established.
There is an important lesson here for England and Wales. While legislation can create the conditions for lasting reform, it is rarely enough on its own. Agencies do not need to wait for the next Bill before changing how they work with children. Progress can begin now through stronger diversion, better decision-making around remand, closer partnership with children's social care, more effective reintegration and a shared approach to supporting children at risk of custody.
At the same time, Scotland's experience is a reminder that practice change does not happen by goodwill alone. It requires visible leadership, investment in the workforce, shared data, accountability and sustained political commitment. Without those foundations, new policy language can too easily be absorbed into old ways of working.
Leaders need to build public confidence before pressure hits.
Reforming youth justice is not only a policy challenge; it is a political one. The most serious cases, especially those involving significant harm, exploitation, or violence, often shape public debate about children who offend. In those moments, the pressure to move towards more punitive responses can be immense.
Scotland's experience indicates that building public confidence is essential before those moments arrive. Throughout its reforms, leaders consistently made the case that reducing children's involvement in the justice system was not about lowering expectations or avoiding accountability; it was about responding in ways that were more likely to reduce future offending, improve public safety and help children change and recognising that the children who committed these offences were children first and foremost.
That message becomes even more important when children pose a serious risk of harm. A child-centred approach does not mean that every child should remain in the community or avoid restrictions on their liberty. It means that, where deprivation of liberty is necessary, the response should still be rooted in care, relationships and rehabilitation, rather than punishment alone.
There is an important lesson here for England and Wales. Reform cannot rely on the evidence alone. It also requires political and system leadership that is willing to explain difficult decisions, build public understanding and maintain confidence when individual cases inevitably test the system. Public confidence is not a by-product of reform; it is one of the conditions that makes reform possible.
Secure care reform is about more than the building.
Ending the use of Young Offender Institutions for children is one of the most visible changes Scotland has made. But the discussion made clear that the real reform was never simply about replacing one type of institution with another.
Secure care sits within a much wider system. It depends on how places are commissioned and funded, whether there is sufficient capacity, how the workforce is trained, who holds responsibility for children, and whether services are able to support them before, during and after a period of deprivation of liberty. If those parts of the system are not aligned, changing the setting alone is unlikely to change children's experiences or outcomes.
That is an important lesson for England and Wales. As ministers develop a new Youth Custody Transformation Plan, attention will inevitably turn to the future of the secure estate. Scotland's experience suggests that reform cannot focus only on where children are placed. It also has to address how the wider system works around those children, from commissioning and governance to transition planning, local support and the availability of credible alternatives to custody.
Changing the building is the visible part of reform. Changing the system is what makes that reform work.
The real lesson from Scotland
Scotland's reforms were shaped by its own legal framework, political context and institutions. England and Wales cannot simply replicate the Children's Hearings System, The Promise or the Whole System Approach. Nor should it try.
What Scotland's experience does show is that reducing children's involvement in custody was never the product of a single reform. It came from a sustained effort to change how children were understood, how agencies worked together, how evidence informed decision-making, and how leaders built support for a different way of responding to children in conflict with the law. Reforming the secure estate formed part of that journey, but it was not where the journey began. Children's journeys into custody are shaped by decisions made long before they appear in court, by the support they receive, the opportunities they are given, and whether the agencies around them work towards a shared understanding of their needs. Scotland's experience suggests that lasting reform is built across the whole system, with a shared ambition to ensure that fewer children need custody in the first place.
As England and Wales develops its own programme of youth justice reform, the Youth Custody Transformation Plan offers an opportunity not only to rethink what happens when children enter custody, but to ask a more fundamental question: what would it take for fewer children to reach custody at all? Answering that question means looking beyond the secure estate. It means recognising that children's journeys into custody are shaped long before they appear in court, by the support they receive, the opportunities available to them, the way agencies work together, and whether the system responds in ways that reduce harm rather than entrench it. Scotland's experience suggests that lasting reform is built across the whole system, with a shared ambition to ensure that fewer children need custody in the first place.