Youth Justice Oversight Framework
The Youth Justice Oversight Framework is used to monitor the performance of Youth Justice Services. It explains how the Youth Justice Board’s (YJB) monitoring function is fulfilled. It outlines how oversight of local youth justice services (YJSs) is undertaken and how delivery across the wider system is understood. It aims to reinforce the Child First approach.
Details
The oversight framework is designed to ensure that priorities are aligned and performance is monitored to drive improvement. It provides an objective basis for intervention if required.
The YJB assesses YJSs across four fields:
- Service delivery (including court processes, custody and out-of-court disposals).
- Service leadership (including governance, resource use and effectiveness of partnerships).
- Local strategic priorities, based on annual Youth Justice Plans and local data.
- Continuous improvement (including responses to inspection reports and performance compared to the key performance indicators (KPIs)).
The framework also highlights the need for YJSs to ensure that the voices of the children they work with are included. They will assess how a service has:
- incorporated the wishes of the victim in their approaches to working with children
- any tangible examples of how feedback from children has been used to make effective changes in service delivery
- information about the process undertaken to gather the views and feedback of both children and victims, and how that is analysed for service development.
The YJB also monitors YJSs’ compliance with the terms and conditions of the Youth Justice Core Grant, including on governance standards, service delivery and case management, and data a reporting obligations.
The framework relies on quantitative and qualitative data to assess performance, using a combination of KPIs, inspection outcomes and examination of local youth justice plans and self-assessments.
Following assessment under the framework, YJSs are placed into one of four performance quadrants, with a score of 1 being ‘strong performance’ down to 4 ‘persistent underperformance’.
Commentary
We at YJLC wish to highlight the Youth Justice Board Framework to our Youth Justice Service readers as a critical part of ensuring that YJSs are performing well.
The framework seeks to reinforce the ‘Child First’ approach: putting children at the heart of the system, preventing offending, and achieving better outcomes for them, communities, and victims.
It is this approach that the evidence suggests is the most effective at preventing offending by children and in turn best reduce the harm caused to communities and victims, and the principles of which YJSs should adhere to in order to be assess as providing ‘strong performance’.