Agenda item

To provide an update to the Council’s Corporate Parenting Committee about the London Protocol on reducing criminalisation of Looked After Children and Care Leavers, published in March 2021. Previous reports have been presented to the Corporate Parenting Committee in April 2019 and January 2022.

Kelli Eboji (Head of LAC and Permanency, Brent Council) introduced the report, which provided a progress update on the London protocol for reducing the criminalisation of Looked After Children (LAC) and Care Leavers and the MOPAC London wide guidance. In introducing the report, she highlighted the following key points:

·         The key objectives of the work focused on providing a practice model that aimed to introduce and improve preventative measures, reduce re-offending behaviour and rehabilitate young people who had offended through effective joint working between relevant agencies. The protocol highlighted the impact of previous trauma, attachments issues and specific vulnerabilities of LAC and care leavers. As such, the protocol encouraged agencies to use a trauma-informed approach to practice as well as restorative approaches in a child-centred way to enable integrated, coordinated, and proactive responses to prevent and address challenging offending behaviour.

·         It had been found that care experienced children were six times more likely to be criminalised than any other group of children, and just over half of care experienced children would have a criminal conviction by the age of 24 compared to 10% of their non-care experienced peers.

·         Although LAC were overrepresented in the UK Youth Justice System, the number of LAC supervised by Brent’s Youth Justice Service had halved in the three years between 2021-23.

·         Brent continued to focus on the issue of equality and disproportionality in regard to criminalisation, because young people from Black heritage groups were currently overrepresented in the data.

·         Priorities for the next year included:

o   exploring how the local authority could work together with accommodation provider forums to reduce the criminalisation of LAC and care leavers by ensuring staff responses to behavioural difficulties which may be viewed as criminal were proportionate and appropriate and the need for police involvement / court action was minimised.

o   training for Foster Carers focused on de-escalation.

o   training for Personal Advisors around providing advocacy when supporting young people in prison.

o   Implementation of a joint staff forum with LAC providers and the Youth Justice Service.

The Chair thanked Kelli Eboji for her introduction and invited contributions from the Committee, with the following points raised:

Representatives from CLIA asked whether there were any interactive sessions and workshops available to care leavers and LAC to prevent them from going into the Youth Justice System, particularly focused on addressing the statistics included in the report, which they felt would be motivating for young people. They were advised that each individual had their own complexities around prevention. In section 5.15 of the report there were details of ‘Your Choice’, which was a programme providing training to practitioners working with young people at medium to high risk of harm teaching Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) techniques to use during the delivery of interventions with young people in the programme. The programme had recently started being offered in the LAC and Permanency Service, and was already offered within the Accelerated Support Team and Youth Justice Service. This programme was known to have positive outcomes and it was hoped that by the time young people left care they had removed themselves from criminality and were focused on their future. For young care leavers in custody, they were offered supported accommodation when they left and offered key worker sessions with their probation officer and personal adviser to prevent future escalation.  

In relation to the de-escalation training available for foster carers which was a priority for the following year, CLIA representatives highlighted that many foster carers and semi-independent providers may not be aware of that opportunity and asked for further promotion of those sessions. The Committee asked whether the training was being provided because it was common for foster carers to escalate issues to the police, and CLIA representatives highlighted that there was a tendency for foster carers to jump to conclusions and escalate to the police in the first instance if anything went wrong. Kelli Eboji thanked CLIA for the insights. She felt it was important to start that conversation with foster carers through the training and keep that dialogue open to minimise escalation and instead consider what they would do if it were their own child.

The Committee asked for further information around disproportionality and whether there was an action plan to address that. Palvinder Kudhail (Director Integration and Improved Outcomes, Brent Council) highlighted that there were regular discussions about disproportionality and closing that gap. Staff had been through anti-racism training and the service ensured that learning from intense interventions was put into practice and responses were focused on the individual. The Youth Justice Service in Brent had a monthly session with young people which usually included a guest speaker to talk about different topics. Some of the speakers had been involved in the youth justice system in some way in the past and had turned their lives around so these talks were often motivating for young people. It was agreed that the report presented the following year would provide progress updates against the action plan.  

The Committee acknowledged that transitions could be a challenging time for children and young people, such as leaving placements and leaving the Youth Justice System from child focused to adult focused. Afzal Ahmed (Service Manager – Leaving Care, Brent Council)) agreed that transitions were challenging which was why the Council had a Transitions Panel which focused on young people in custody due to be rehabilitated into the community. There were early indicators to identify who those young people were, and the Council had developed good relationships with youth offending institutes to plan a pathway early for that young person with their dedicated support officer. That meant that when the young person left custody, they had very clear objectives and actions and were offered intense key worker support within semi-independent provision. That work was done in conjunction with the young person’s Probation Officer and focused on de-escalation, engaging them in activities and giving them functional skills to help them realise what they could achieve.

The Committee were unfamiliar with the Home Office Disruption Toolkit and asked for further information on what that was. Afzal Ahmed explained that the toolkit was relevant to practitioners involved in the safeguarding of children and provided advice and guidance on disrupting child exploitation. In response to what happened when the Council were made aware that a child who had been a victim of criminal exploitation was in court, Afzal Ahmed explained that if a young person was known to have been exploited they would have been referred through the National Referral Mechanism and relevant agencies would be aware, including the police and probation, who would then ensure that any preventative work took that information into account.

The Committee noted that the paper detailed positive working with courts to make them more sensitive to the needs and challenges of young people’s experiences and asked whether the courts had an insufficient understanding of the challenges of growing up in care and discrimination. Kelli Eboji highlighted that the courts tended to lack an understanding of the vulnerabilities of care experienced young people. One way the Council combatted that was to ensure Social Workers and Youth Justice Workers were working closely together so that when court reports were prepared that information was available and clear to the courts. Discrimination was being tackled through having open dialogue sessions with magistrates to remind them of discrimination and disproportionality and call that out.

The Committee highlighted that a key risk for LAC was being targeted for county lines and asked how the Exploitation, Violence and Vulnerability Panel (EVVP) took action on that specific risk. Afzal Ahmed highlighted that the EVVP worked as a safety planning mechanism. For example, if a young person was at risk of county lines there would be relevant agencies present at the panel to review the case, such as the police and commissioning colleagues, who could make decisions regarding that case. The Panel had a multi-agency framework for looking at one at-risk person and the mechanisms for keeping them safe, and there was a lot of resources and input there from different professionals to prevent further risks. 

The Committee asked for historical data to be included in future reports so that they could review any trends and assure themselves that the work was improving.

RESOLVED:

i)              To note the content of the report and progress made since the introduction of the London Protocol on reducing the criminalisation of looked after children and care leavers.

ii)             To advocate in support of the key principles set out within the London Protocol on behalf of looked after children and care leavers when exercising their duties as corporate parents.