About the YJB
Monitoring and Improving Practice
We are responsible for monitoring the performance of the youth justice system. We do this to inform and influence how the youth justice system operates, and to identify and promote practice that can help prevent offending by children and young people and protect the public. It also gives us the evidence we need to advise the Secretaries of State for Justice and Children, Schools and Families and other ministers.
Monitoring the secure estate
We monitor the performance of the secure estate through frameworks that assure us that providers have effective systems in place to meet our requirements and to let us know when those are not operating properly.
Monitoring does not replace the management of the secure estate – this is done by the companies and organisations that are contracted to run secure establishments. Our monitors do not check everything the contracted companies and organisations do, as it is up to them to ensure adequate systems are in place to help them to make decisions.
Our requirements are written in contracts, service level agreements and publications such as Managing the Behaviour of Children and Young People in the Secure Estate.
Each secure establishment’s performance is monitored by a YJB secure accommodation performance monitor, who works with the establishment to ensure that our requirements are being met and it is complying with its contract. Our monitors can also offer support to improve performance.
Monitoring YOTs
Our regional teams monitor the performance of YOTs and help them improve where necessary. We monitor YOT performance through the YOT Performance Framework. It is designed to provide a comprehensive assessment of YOT performance against a range of measures, including:
Where the framework identifies poor performance, our regional teams will work with the YOT to address it.
Improving practice
We are committed to improving practice in YOTs and the secure estate by identifying and promoting effective practice. By effective practice, we mean practice that has been evaluated and proven to reduce the likelihood of young people offending or reoffending.
To do this, we have developed the Key Elements of Effective Practice that describe the features of effective services, and support the identification of staff learning and development needs. In order to ensure that the Key Elements of Effective Practice are implemented, we have developed the Quality Assurance Framework, which we want to see used across all youth justice services. The framework requires services to assess their own performance against the Key Elements of Effective Practice and, where necessary, develop plans to improve it.
To provde further support to youth justice services seeking to improve their practice, we have developed the Directory of Emerging Practice which is a database of programmes and processes, developed by youth justice services themselves, that we have identified as being examples of promising practice. The directory is available on our website, and provides a means of sharing the examples to avoid services duplicating effort.