Child First Day: Celebrating the Principle, Confronting the Reality

Today is Child First Day. It is an opportunity to celebrate how far youth justice has moved in its understanding of children, but it should also be an opportunity to ask a more difficult question:

How Child First is our youth justice system in practice?

Child First has become part of the language of youth justice in England and Wales. The Youth Justice Board describes it through four interconnected tenets: seeing children as children, building positive identities, collaborating with children, and promoting diversion from stigma and unnecessary justice-system contact.

These are important principles. They represent a significant shift away from approaches which primarily understood children through offending, risk and deficits. Child First asks us to recognise development, relationships, strengths, identity, structural barriers and the capacity for change.

There is also good reason to believe that this is more than an attractive philosophy. The YJB describes Child First as a framework drawing together the evidence about effective work with children in trouble, rather than as a single intervention or theory.

But celebrating Child First should not mean avoiding the tensions involved in delivering it.

Child First is easier to describe than to practise

The principles are relatively straightforward. Their application is not.

A practitioner can believe strongly that a child should not be defined by their offending and still be required to produce assessments centred heavily on risk, harm, offending behaviour and compliance. We can say that children should collaborate in decisions while still inviting them into processes whose parameters have largely already been determined. We can promote positive identity while repeatedly asking children to revisit the worst things they have done. We can advocate minimum intervention while operating within a system capable of generating assessments, panels, appointments, reviews and professional involvement around children who may already have substantial numbers of adults involved in their lives.

None of this necessarily means that Child First has failed. It means that implementing it requires more than changing terminology.

The YJB's own commissioned research into the application of Child First, published in 2025, is significant precisely because implementation matters. Child First cannot be judged simply by whether services recognise the four tenets. The more important question is what those principles change about children's actual experience of youth justice.

Being Child First does not mean ignoring harm

There is sometimes an unhelpful assumption that Child First sits in opposition to public protection, accountability or victims. It should not.

Recognising a child as a child does not mean pretending harmful behaviour has not occurred. Developmentally informed practice does not remove responsibility. Understanding why something happened does not mean excusing it.

Good Child First practice should allow practitioners to hold several things together.

A child may have caused serious harm and have experienced significant harm themselves. A child may need boundaries and compassion. Communities and victims may need protection and a punitive response may not be the most effective way of achieving it. A child can take responsibility for behaviour without being required to adopt an identity based upon it. Indeed, the YJB explicitly connects Child First with safer communities and fewer victims.

This distinction matters. If Child First becomes understood simply as "being nice to children", we diminish it. It is a much more demanding proposition. It asks us to respond to harm in ways that are developmentally appropriate, evidence-informed and more likely to reduce its recurrence.

The system matters as much as the practitioner

There is another uncomfortable reality.

We sometimes talk about Child First as though its success depends primarily upon individual practitioners. Be curious. Build relationships. Use strengths-based language. Collaborate. Avoid labels. Understand trauma. Consider development. All of these things matter, but practitioners operate within systems.

They work within legislation, national standards, assessment frameworks, inspection arrangements, local policies, court expectations, safeguarding processes, performance measures and multi-agency systems. Some of those structures fit comfortably with Child First. Others can create tensions with it.

That makes Child First an organisational question, not simply a practice question.

The YJB's current guidance for youth justice plans reflects this by asking partnerships to demonstrate how the four Child First tenets will be implemented through practical service delivery. The distinction between saying a service is Child First and organising a service around Child First is important.

If practitioners are expected to work relationally but have insufficient time to build relationships, there is a problem.

If children's participation becomes another box within an assessment, there is a problem.

If strengths are recorded but have little influence on the intervention plan, there is a problem.

If diversion creates another pathway of professional intervention rather than genuinely reducing system contact, we should ask whether we are diverting at all.

And if the demands of audit, recording and assurance consistently take practitioners away from children, we need to be willing to ask what our systems are designed to prioritise.

Inspection tells an interesting story

There are encouraging signs, however.

HM Inspectorate of Probation's 2026 annual report found strong performance in youth justice services around engaging children and relationship-based practice, with work to achieve positive change tending to be consistently strong. At the same time, work concerned with keeping children and communities safe was the area most frequently requiring development across assessment, planning and delivery.

That is worth reflecting on.

The challenge ahead is not to retreat from relational or Child First practice in response to concerns about safety. It is to become better at integrating the two. The best assessment should not require us to choose between understanding the child and understanding risk. The best intervention should not require us to choose between building identity and addressing harmful behaviour, and the best youth justice system should not require us to choose between improving children's lives and making communities safer.

Those objectives should reinforce one another.

We also need to ask children

Perhaps one of the simplest tests of Child First is also one of the most demanding:

Would the child recognise the service they received as Child First?

Not whether the assessment says they participated.

Not whether the intervention plan contains strengths.

Not whether a strategy document references the four tenets.

Did the child feel listened to?

Did they understand what was happening?

Did they have meaningful influence over the work?

Did somebody recognise what they were good at?

Did their involvement with youth justice help them move towards something, rather than simply away from offending?

Did they leave the system with a stronger identity than the one with which they entered it?

Those questions take Child First from policy into lived experience.

Child First also requires system restraint

The fourth tenet may ultimately be one of the most challenging: diversion from stigma and unnecessary criminal justice involvement. A genuinely Child First system must sometimes decide not to intervene.

That can be difficult for professional systems. Services are generally designed to do things: assess, refer, plan, supervise, review and intervene, but more intervention is not automatically better intervention.

The national standards explicitly connect Child First with prevention, diversion and minimum intervention, alongside reducing the stigma associated with justice-system contact. That principle should make us curious about every additional layer we place around a child.

What is this meeting achieving?

Why does this assessment need this information?

What will this referral add?

Does this child genuinely need another professional?

Could their family, school or community provide something more naturally?

And perhaps most importantly: When should youth justice step away?

A system confident enough to withdraw when it is no longer needed may be more Child First than one which can demonstrate increasingly sophisticated intervention.

So, what should Child First Day celebrate?

It should celebrate practitioners who see children beyond their offences.

It should celebrate services experimenting with better ways of involving children, families and communities.

It should celebrate diversion, relationship-based practice and the growing recognition that identity, development, relationships and opportunity matter.

But Child First Day should also retain some discomfort because Child First was never supposed to be a slogan.

The real test is not whether we can describe the four tenets, as most of us working in youth justice probably can. The test is what happens when Child First becomes inconvenient.

When a child does not engage.

When an offence is serious.

When public or political pressure demands punishment.

When another agency wants enforcement.

When risk makes professionals anxious.

When organisational processes demand more information, more meetings or more intervention.

When allowing a child genuine participation means accepting that their priorities are different from ours.

Those are the moments in which Child First becomes meaningful.

So today is worth celebrating, but perhaps the most useful way to mark Child First Day is not simply to say that we are Child First.

It is to keep asking:

What would we do differently if we really were?