Diverting children from the justice system

We work closely with a number of Youth Offending Services to help them develop and make the case for point-of-arrest youth diversion schemes across England and Wales.

In February 2015 Suffolk Youth Offending Service (SYOS) in partnership with Suffolk Constabulary piloted an Enhanced Triage model in the north of the county.

The Enhanced Triage model is an integrated decision-making model for out of court disposals combined with a youth diversion scheme. University Campus Suffolk (UCS) were commissioned to complete an evaluation of the pilot while we at the Centre provided the YOS with our youth diversion cost avoidance tool. We worked with the service to provide further evidence of the value of funding this youth diversion scheme in Suffolk.

The pilot and evaluation were completed in September 2015, with the final evaluation report and the cost avoidance toolkit presented in December 2015 to the SYOS Management Board which included representatives from both children’s services and the youth justice system.
 

What our partners say

“The cost avoidance toolkit and Ben’s presentation provided credible and robust evidence to support the financial case for implementing the model across the county. The Enhanced Triage pilot required additional police resources to be seconded to SYOS and the cost avoidance toolkit enabled the service to present a strong evidence base to justify the additional investment required to roll out the scheme county wide. On the basis of both the UCS evaluation report and the cost avoidance toolkit the resources required to roll out the scheme have been agreed by the SYOS Management Board and this will be implemented from 1 May 2016.”