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A warm welcome to each and every one of you!

• I am delighted to be here, and it really is an honour to open this Child First Youth Justice Conference.
• For those of you that dont know me, Im the Chair of the Youth Justice Board, and in April I celebrated two years in the role.
• Prior to that, I had a long career in the police where I worked my way through various positions, from police constable to Superintendent.
• At the YJB, I also hold the brief of being the Board Champion for Over-represented children, and that is part of the reason why I am here today.
• As you can see, we have a very exciting agenda for today, including some expert speakers and this is thanks to Lancashire Child and Youth Justice Service and supported via its partnership with The University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) and youth justice services in the north west (these services are: Blackburn with Darwen, Blackpool, Cumbria, Lancashire and Liverpool).
• I want to touch on that partnership a little before I start. Five years ago, the YJB published a working guide for setting up partnerships between youth justice services and the academic community.
• The aim was to allow youth justice workers to have access to expert advice and training, while giving academics valuable access to data and providing placement opportunities for their students.
• So, the seeds were sown, and with such clear mutual benefits it was not surprising that partnerships began springing up across the country, and the rest, as they say, is history.
• Last year, the partnership with UCLAN utilised YJB pathfinder funding to commission an evaluation of its Child-First Diversion service.
• As befits a Child First approach, the research was participatory in nature and involved UCLAN conducting interviews with a group of children. The children identified themes which were important to them, which in turn helped to inform the wider qualitative and quantitative research methods.
• I wont go over too much of that now, but Id like to thank those of you that joined a webinar the pathfinder held back in April. It provided a fascinating insight into the evaluation and what this pathfinder has achieved over the two years.
• There was a great analogy that stuck with me of how the team were looking to embed Child First values throughout the service like a stick of rock. You know, the popular seaside sweets that are the bane of dentists everywhere. Anyway, the point being that Child First is to be deeply engrained and run through all the work that is done. You could say it is a fundamental value or guiding principle.
• Having a guiding principle is important for ensuring that daily decision-making stays in touch with the values that really matter.
• At the YJB, we have gone about this by crafting the following vision that underpins all that we do:
• Our vision is for a Child First youth justice system: A youth justice system that sees children as children, treats them fairly and helps them to build on their strengths so they can make a constructive contribution to society. This will prevent offending and create safer communities with fewer victims.
• What I want to do today is to unpick just one element from that vision and talk about it with you.
• Treats them fairly.

What do we mean by treats them fairly?

• I think that we can safely describe that statement as the right to equity of treatment, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and sex.
• This, by definition, means that we must reduce over-representation of these groups in the youth justice system.
• And so, it is a cause for extreme concern that for some groups of children we are failing to make reductions.
• Namely those with Black or Mixed ethnicities, children from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller backgrounds and children looked-after.
• Let me give you some examples:
• Our annual statistics, published in January, showed that Black children account for 4% of the 10 to 17-year-old population but contributed to:
• 18% of stop and searches, where ethnicity was known
• 15% of arrests
• 12% of children cautioned or sentenced
• 34% of children in custody on remand, and
• 29% of the youth custody population as a whole, which is an increase from 18% a decade ago.
• Those same statistics also show that children with a Mixed ethnicity are over-represented in most stages of the system. This includes stop and search, arrests, cautions and sentences and custody.
• We also know that children from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller backgrounds are disproportionately impacted. A lack of reliable data makes it hard to determine the exact numbers, but an HMIP report from 2018/19 found that 8% of children in young offender institutions and 13% in secure training centres identified themselves as Travellers.
• This compares to 0.1% of individuals in the general population, as listed in the 2011 Census, and I suspect that this is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the true extent of this disproportionality.
• While were talking about fairness, and despite patchy data, I also want to acknowledge some of the additional factors that impact and overlap for these groups, and children in the youth justice system as a whole.
• It is estimated that at least one in three people in the justice system may be neurodivergent. This is a huge proportion and these individuals will of course have other challenges in their life, both past and present. More work is clearly required in this area.
• Indeed, a joint review last year by HMI Prisons, HMI Probation and HMI Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, concluded that more effective assessment of need, adaptation of services and better training of staff was needed to support those with neurodivergent conditions.
• Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have a tremendous impact on future violence victimisation and perpetration, and lifelong health and opportunity, with research showing that those that have suffered four or more ACEs can make them more likely to be involved in violence, as victim, perpetrator or both.
• When compared to the general population, Black people are five times more likely than White people to become victims of homicide.
• Around half (49%) of Black victims were in the 16 to 24-year-old age group.
• Also, let us not forget care experienced children. A research brief, published last year, estimated that between 37 per cent and 50 per cent of children in custody have been in care at some point in their lives. Exposure to custody of course escalates the barriers they already face and compounds already damaging stigma.

So, what can we do about it?

• At the YJB, we have led a diverse range of activity to help us tackle over-representation several ways. This includes:
• Preventing and diverting children from over-represented groups, and indeed all children, from entering the youth justice system in the first place.
• Helping to develop and provide positive role models for children from within the youth justice workforce, via the Elevate programme.
• Developing and sharing tools so that services can better analyse their local level data and plan how they respond to any disparities.
• Commissioning and publishing research.
• Enabling strategic partnership conversations around disproportionality and its impact before and during contact with the system.
• Id now like to highlight some of the work were doing around these areas in more detail for you
• If I was to loosely group some of our activity up, to help to prevent and divert, we have:
• We supported the Alliance of Sport to secure a record-breaking one-million-pound grant from the London Marathon Charitable Trust for the Levelling the Playing Field project. A three-year innovative project which will engage with over 11,000 children from ethnic minorities using a trauma-informed approach and a health model to prevent and divert children using the power of physical activity and sport.
• Started a three-year project on the COVID-19 response to over-represented childre
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