The Youth Offending Team have recently started a piece of work focussing on young looked after children providing them with opportunities to take part in socially acceptable activities.

See the new Looked After Children newsletter by clicking here.

This work related to one of our national performance indicators: PAF C18 that looks at the percentage of all Looked after Children (who are aged 10 and over and have been looked after continuously for 12 months or more) who have been given a final warning or been reprimanded, cautioned or convicted. This is expressed as a ratio, comparing it to the percentage of all children in the district who were given a final warning or reprimanded, cautioned or convicted during the year.

Our performance for last year was 3.2 (meaning the percentage of LAC being given a final warning etc. was over three times bigger than the percentage of all children in the district). This performance is slightly higher than the country as a whole – England average for last year was 2.9. Our target for this year is to improve our performance to 3.0.

Mehnaz Malik started this work in April this year. She is based at the Young People’s Support unit in Barkerend Road. Her role is a dedicated post within the team working on this project. Mehnaz reports that she has identified an initial target group of 80 young people. These were chosen through fulfilling the following criteria:

• Aged over 9 years 6 months

• Looked After continuously for 12 months or more

• Those at risk of offending:

• Poor school attendees

• Siblings of offenders

• OLA returning to Bradford

• Children excluded from school

Of the initial 80 young people, the majority are aged between 13 and 16 years, but the split between male and female is pretty equal with just slightly more males than females.

Mehnaz is contacting the social workers responsible for these children to let them know they are in the target group and to discuss her work with them. Further to this she is in the process of identifying whether any of the young people in the target group are already in preventative programmes and directing others towards suitable social activities and projects operating from the Young Person’s Support Unit.

For further details contact: