Birmingham Youth Offending Service

Working Together with Ring and Ride

Young Offenders Support to the Ring and Ride Service

George Pejcic, Performance and Development Project Manager, explains here what the Youth Offending scheme is, what its aims are and how young people are now helping us at our South Birmingham depot.

Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) or Youth Offending Services (YOS) were set up in 2000 in response to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 to work with all Children and Young People (aged 10-17) who come to the attention of the Police and the Courts. Their main function is to prevent offending and re-offending. The standards by which they work and monitoring and evaluation of their interventions falls to the Youth Justice Board, now part of the Ministry of Justice.

There are currently 156 YOTs or YOS in England and Wales of which Birmingham is the largest. Birmingham Youth Offending Service (BYOS) in keeping with the other YOTs consists of staff from a variety of agencies; Police, Probation, Health, Education and Social services. BYOS has five YOTs placed geographically around the city and also has teams which focus on the Courts, Inappropriate Sexual behaviour and provide Intensive Supervision and Surveillance.

BYOS staff offer a variety of interventions to address issues that young people may have such as Substance misuse, Mental or physical health, Education, Training and Employment or assistance with Accommodation or Access to benefits. Work undertaken on Community Orders may take the form of one to one or group work. Young people are also supported during periods of being remanded or sentenced to custody. Parents of the young people may also be given support where appropriate.

The government, towards the end of 2008 launched its new Youth Crime Action Plan and invited Local Authorities to bid for additional funding to set up projects to offer greater support to families and also to provide reparation activities that could be used to reduce the number of young people on the streets during the evenings, with the aim of reducing incidents of criminal and anti-social behaviour.

Birmingham put forward a package of interventions, one of which included BYOS developing and running 'Evening Reparation' sessions on Fridays and Saturdays. These sessions were designed to involve young people, who have come to the attention of BYOS for criminal or anti-social behaviour, in physical activities that will reduce their free time in the evening. In doing so it was also important that young people would be giving something back to the community, a form of 'community payback'. In designing the programme, it was felt that young people would be more committed to engaging in activities where they could see the results of their work, gain a sense of achievement and where possible develop work skills and ethics that would assist in their future employability.

West Midlands Special Needs Transport (WMSNT) were approached and after a couple of meetings it was agreed that the project could be mutually beneficial. SPN recognised that it would assist in maintaining the high standard of cleanliness of their Ring and Ride vehicles at no extra costs and for BYOS it provided a safe environment to work in all weathers with a continuous supply of vehicles. In addition it was recognised that the project would be benefit to a charitable organisation which provides a valuable service to some of the most disadvantaged people in the community.

All young people are provided with Personal Protective Equipment by BYOS and given training in Health and Safety and safe working practices for the Frankley Ring and Ride depot . Groups of up to 6 young people, supervised by 2 BYOS staff undertake work in the evening at the Frankley depot on Friday and Saturday evenings, each young person being involved in 4 sessions. In many cases these sessions are part of longer Community orders imposed by the Courts.

The Frankley depot provides the project with the vehicles and the environmentally friendly cleaning material. None of the staff at Frankley depot are used to supervise or monitor the young people.