News from Beyond Youth Custody – April 2017
10 April 2017
I am delighted to share some news with you – the Big Lottery Fund has granted Beyond Youth Custody (BYC) an extension until March 2018. This enables us to continue our work influencing youth justice policy and embedding learning about effective resettlement into practice. Over the coming year, we will use BYC’s evidence base to influence the changing youth justice landscape.
Recent work
- Youth in Focus (YIF) is a Big Lottery Fund initiative which supported BYC and 15 voluntary sector projects working with young people leaving custody. In February, the BYC team brought together colleagues from across the country from YIF resettlement projects for a workshop in which they shared experiences, identified common themes, and shared examples of positive practice and solutions to overcoming barriers. A write-up from the workshop can be found here.
- On 29 March, a full house gathered at the House of Lords to celebrate five years of BYC and the YIF programme. We were delighted to be joined by the Minister with responsibility for youth justice, Dr Phillip Lee, and more than 150 partners including young people, practitioners, Peers, MPs and other representatives from across the youth justice sector. Special thanks to Noel and Suraj for delivering inspirational speeches at the event and the Action West London team for their support.
- The event also launched BYC’s new report ‘Lessons from Youth in Focus’, which highlights key lessons from the YIF programme, using the characteristics identified by BYC as a framework for understanding and describing these lessons. If you would like hard copies of the report, please email beyondyouthcustody@nacro.org.uk
- This week we also published the full research report that accompanies the ‘Lessons from Youth in Focus’ summary report. The full research report contains detailed information about each of the 15 YIF projects and their different models for delivering resettlement support to young custody leavers. It provides a thorough analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data sets from the projects, including data from interviews, project client databases, survey returns and offending data relating to YIF participants.
Upcoming work
- In May, we will be taking up several speaking opportunities including presenting to the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, co-delivering a workshop at the Tackling Multiple Disadvantage National Summit and presenting at the Westminster Briefing conference ‘Future of Youth Offending and the Impact of the Taylor Review’.
- A priority in the coming months will be to continue to work closely with partners and to disseminate our learning. If you would like to get involved in BYC’s work, want us to present at an upcoming event or know of any young people who would be interested in contributing to the programme, please email beyondyouthcustody@nacro.org.uk
And finally…
After two and a half years working on the BYC programme at Nacro, Sarah Wilkinson will be leaving us at the end of this week to move on to the next stage of her career at Barnardo’s. Sarah has led on delivery of the communications and engagement work for BYC, as well as young people’s participation work. As many of you will know from our partnership working, Sarah has been an amazing asset to the programme and has shown a passion and enthusiasm for working with partners and young people that has been pivotal to the success of BYC. She will be sorely missed and I’m sure you will all join me in wishing Sarah all the very best for the future!
Thank you for your support of BYC. Please do pass this update on to colleagues who may be interested in our work.
Kind regards,
Pippa Goodfellow
BYC Programme Manager