Good rating for our Youth Offending Service

The council’s Youth Offending Service has been rated as ‘good overall’ by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) inspectors.

The rigorous inspection, which took place online during August, looked at three areas within the service – organisational delivery of the service, the quality of work undertaken with children sentenced by the courts and the quality of out of court disposals.

HMIP inspects against 12 standards shared between the above three areas. Seven standards were graded as ‘good’, two as ‘outstanding’ and three as 'requires improvement'.

Councillor Stuart Carroll, cabinet member for adult social care, children’s services, health and mental health, says: “This is an impressive outcome and is testament to the commitment and hard work of everyone involved.

“I would like to express my thanks to the core youth offending team and all of those who work as part of our extended ‘virtual’ team for this great outcome. Delivery of this service is always a great team effort.

“We are committed to ensuring we look after our children and young people and following our successful good rating for children’s services earlier this year, I am delighted that we have been able to secure this good rating as well.”

The Youth Offending Team Board will now oversee the action plan that will be produced over the next couple of weeks to drive further improvements in the service.

HMIP announced their inspection in late July and during the pre-fieldwork period, they worked with the service to plan all aspects of the inspection.

Fieldwork took place online because of the ongoing pandemic, and the team of inspectors met with managers, staff and our partners.

Today sees the publication of the inspectors’ report and rating of the service against the framework standards.

HMIP started inspecting Youth Offending Teams against a new set of standards in March 2018.