Knowledge Transfer Partnership – Child Centred Justice
This Groundbreaking Knowledge Transfer Partnership will create a Child Centred Youth Justice System across Greater Manchester.
The KTP will help the Greater Manchester Combined Authority to work towards its ‘Child Centred’ Youth Justice vision by developing a cultural and process change framework that will enable the lived experiences of children to be foregrounded into the design of systems and interventions, while upskilling staff in developing a working culture premised on child centred justice. Initially, it will work with the GM YOTs and the GMP Child Friendly policing team to innovate practice across the five areas of: police custody, out of court resolutions, early intervention and prevention, resettlement, and sentencing. This will reduce the number of children and young people entering the Youth Justice System, improve out of court disposals, and reduce reoffending rates for those that do – leading to cost savings and improvements in the productivity and efficiency of commissioning and delivering Youth Justice Services. This will be the first attempt to harness the evidence base regarding embedding and subsequently evaluating a child centred organisational strategy, to propose a model of better practice to divert children from the Youth Justice System. It will leverage the GMCA’s unique conditions to create a new transferrable framework that can be applied in adjacent child facing services, with wider adoption/dissemination through the Ministry of Justice.
Contact Prof. Hannah Smithson h.l.smithson@mmu.ac.uk
