Youth justice practitioners regularly work with children whose lives cannot be neatly divided into separate professional categories. A child may be subject to a court order while also experiencing exploitation, family conflict, unstable housing, school exclusion, poor mental health or unmet care needs. The practitioner cannot ignore those circumstances simply because they sit outside the sentence plan.That is part of what makes good youth justice practice relational, responsive and Child First. It is also where professional boundaries can become dangerously blurred. There is a fine line between responding to the whole child and gradually assuming responsibility for work that properly belongs elsewhere. When services are stretched, thresholds are high and waiting lists are long, youth justice practitioners can become the professionals who remain. Because they have a statutory order, an established relationship and regular contact with the child, they are often expected to fill whatever space has been left. This may feel compassionate. Sometimes it may even be necessary in the immediate moment. But when temporary support becomes an unspoken transfer of responsibility, collaboration has turned into role drift.
Youth justice has always been multidisciplinary
Youth justice was not designed to operate as a self-contained service. Section 39 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 requires youth offending teams to include representatives from social services, police, probation, health and education. This structure recognises that children’s contact with the justice system is rarely disconnected from their wider lives. It also places responsibility across a partnership rather than locating it exclusively with the child’s youth justice practitioner (Crime and Disorder Act 1998, s.39).The distinction matters. Multidisciplinary practice should mean that different agencies bring their respective authority, knowledge and resources to a shared task. It should not mean that one practitioner informally absorbs the duties of every other agency. The Youth Justice Board’s governance guidance reflects this principle. It expects children’s social care, education, police, probation and health to be represented at a sufficiently senior level on youth justice management boards, with the ability to make decisions and commit resources. Partnership is therefore not merely an aspiration for frontline practitioners. It is a governance responsibility (Youth Justice Board, 2021). Yet the reality at operational level can be very different.
How role drift happens
Role drift rarely begins with a formal decision. It develops through a series of apparently reasonable responses.A practitioner makes an additional visit because another service has not engaged. They help a family manage a housing application because no one else is available. They coordinate education provision, pursue a mental health referral, mediate family conflict and provide practical support that should form part of a wider social care plan. Before long, they are not simply contributing youth justice knowledge to a multi-agency response. They are holding the response together. This is particularly likely where the youth justice practitioner has built a strong relationship with the child. Other professionals may argue that it makes sense for the person who already knows the child to undertake the work. Continuity can certainly be valuable, but familiarity does not automatically confer responsibility, capacity, specialist competence or statutory authority.Role drift is also encouraged by a culture in which the most reliable practitioner receives the most work. When someone is known for responding quickly, attending meetings and finding solutions, unfinished tasks begin to migrate towards them. Competence becomes rewarded with accumulation. The problem is not only workload. It is the gradual concealment of system failure.If a youth justice practitioner repeatedly compensates for the absence of another service, the child may receive some short-term help. However, the unmet need becomes less visible. Managers may see a functioning plan rather than a practitioner privately carrying work beyond their role. The system learns that the gap is manageable because someone is quietly managing it.
Child First does not mean professionally limitless
The Child First framework asks practitioners to see children as children, recognise their strengths and capacities, collaborate with them and promote diversion from the justice system. It requires attention to the child’s wider circumstances because meaningful change cannot be produced through offence-focused work alone (Youth Justice Board, 2025). But Child First should not be interpreted as requiring the youth justice practitioner to meet every identified need personally. A practitioner can understand a child holistically without becoming the child’s social worker, therapist, housing officer, education advocate and family support worker. Indeed, a genuinely Child First response should resist placing all support within the youth justice relationship. Doing so risks making access to welfare dependent upon continued justice-system involvement. This is especially important when working with children who may already be over-supervised. Adding every welfare concern to a youth justice plan can expand the reach of the justice system into areas of life that would not be treated as matters of compliance for another child. Help can then acquire an enforcement shadow. A missed welfare appointment may be interpreted as non-engagement, and complex family circumstances may be recorded as evidence of increasing risk. The answer is not to retreat into a narrow, offence-only role. That would be equally inconsistent with Child First practice. The task is to distinguish between:understanding a need and owning responsibility for resolving it; supporting access to a service and replacing that service; coordinating a plan and personally delivering every part of it; responding to an immediate safeguarding concern and indefinitely carrying another agency’s function; and maintaining a trusted relationship and becoming the only adult on whom the entire plan depends. Professional boundaries are not a refusal to help. They are part of making sure the right help is provided by people with the authority, competence and resources to provide it.
Safeguarding is shared, but responsibilities must remain clear
Every practitioner working with children has safeguarding responsibilities. No professional should disregard a concern because another agency has the lead role. Current statutory guidance for England emphasises that no single practitioner can hold the complete picture of a child’s circumstances, making timely information sharing and coordinated action essential (Department for Education, 2026).Shared responsibility, however, does not mean indistinguishable responsibility. Where a child may be experiencing significant harm, the youth justice practitioner must identify, record, share, refer and escalate the concern. They should contribute their knowledge to assessments, strategy discussions and protection planning. What they should not be expected to do is informally substitute for the statutory child protection process because thresholds are disputed, responses are delayed or another service has closed its involvement. There is a critical difference between remaining involved and becoming responsible for everything. Youth justice practitioners often hold valuable information about contextual harm, exploitation, peer relationships and events outside the family home. That expertise should influence social care analysis. It should not be used as a reason for social care responsibility to be displaced back into youth justice.
Recognising when the boundary is moving
Role drift may be occurring when: the practitioner is undertaking tasks because another service has no capacity rather than because the tasks belong to the youth justice plan; the same unmet need is repeatedly raised without a named lead agency accepting responsibility; welfare work is being attached to an order primarily because this is the only available route to support; the practitioner feels personally responsible for preventing the collapse of the entire multi-agency plan; managers know about the gap but continue to rely on informal goodwill; work continues without clear objectives, timescales or an exit point; specialist work is being delivered without the necessary training, supervision or authority; the child or family has come to believe that the youth justice practitioner is their social worker; direct work connected to the child’s sentence is repeatedly displaced by crisis coordination; or raising a boundary is treated as evidence that the practitioner is not Child First. That final point deserves particular attention. Practitioners should not be morally pressured into accepting unlimited responsibility. Commitment to children is not measured by a willingness to work without boundaries.
How practitioners can hold the line
Maintaining boundaries requires more than telling another professional that a task is “not my role”. Used without explanation, that phrase can sound defensive and may leave the child caught between services. A stronger response identifies the need, explains the youth justice contribution and names what remains outstanding.For example: “I will continue to work with the child on the requirements of the order, share relevant information and support their participation in the plan. The housing assessment is not a youth justice function, so we need to identify the service with responsibility, a named lead and a timescale for action”. This keeps the practitioner engaged while making the boundary visible. Before accepting additional work, five questions can help:
What is the purpose of this task?
Is it directly related to the youth justice outcome, or is it being passed across because another service is unavailable?
Which agency has the relevant responsibility and authority?
Who can make the necessary decision, provide the resource or accept statutory accountability?
Am I supporting, coordinating or substituting?
Short-term coordination may be appropriate. Indefinite substitution should not become the default.
What will happen if I accept this work?
Consider what other work will be delayed, what expectations will be created and whether the service gap will become less visible.
What is the escalation and exit plan?
If temporary involvement is necessary, it should have a clear purpose, review point and transfer arrangement. Practitioners should record attempts to obtain support, decisions about agency responsibility and the effect of delays on the child. Repeated gaps should be escalated through supervision, operational management and partnership governance.
The YJB’s current planning guidance places responsibility on management boards to lead strategically across partners and secure a high-quality service. Persistent role confusion is therefore a governance issue, not simply a problem for individual practitioners to negotiate more assertively (Youth Justice Board, 2026).
What managers must do
Individual practitioners cannot maintain effective boundaries if organisational arrangements continually undermine them.Managers need to define the core youth justice role, agree escalation routes and challenge the transfer of work between agencies. Supervision should examine not only whether every need has been addressed, but also who is responsible for addressing it. Managers must be prepared to make service gaps visible at management boards rather than allowing frontline practitioners to absorb them. This is particularly important where youth justice has been structurally integrated with early help, family support or children’s social care. Integration may improve access and communication, but it can also weaken specialist identity if roles and delegated responsibilities are not explicit. YJB-commissioned research into integrated youth justice services recommends preserving specialist youth justice knowledge and establishing clear protocols for responsibilities, handovers and case management (Rehill, 2024).A blended service structure does not remove the need for professional differentiation. It makes clarity even more important.
Boundaries protect children too
There is sometimes a fear that setting a boundary means withdrawing support from a child. Poorly handled, it can. But the absence of boundaries carries its own risks. It can leave children dependent on one practitioner, make support vulnerable when that practitioner is absent, and allow specialist needs to be addressed through goodwill rather than proper provision. It can pull welfare concerns into an enforcement setting and permit statutory partners to avoid accountability. It can also exhaust the practitioners whose consistency and relationships are central to effective work. The purpose of a professional boundary is not to reduce care. It is to prevent care from becoming improvised, personalised and unsustainable.Youth justice practitioners should notice the whole child. They should advocate, coordinate, challenge and remain alongside children when systems become difficult. They should also be able to say clearly where their role ends and another agency’s responsibility begins. Holding that line is not abandoning the child.Sometimes, it is the only way to stop the wider system from doing so.
