Are We Collecting Too Much of the Wrong Information in Youth Justice?

A conversation yesterday about youth justice assessment left me thinking about a fairly simple question: are we collecting the information that actually matters?

Youth justice assessments contain a considerable amount of information. Practitioners are expected to record details about offending, safety and wellbeing, risks to others, education, family circumstances, substance use, relationships, accommodation, health, behaviour and numerous other aspects of a child’s life. Alongside this sit case notes, plans, reviews, contacts, referrals, management oversight, evidence of interventions and records of multi-agency activity.

There are good reasons for much of this. Youth justice services work with children who can have significant needs and, sometimes, present serious concerns about their own safety or that of other people. Decisions made on the basis of assessments can have substantial consequences. Good recording matters.

But volume and quality are not the same thing.

Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is whether youth justice has gradually become very good at recording what systems need to know, while becoming less certain about how to capture what practitioners need to understand.

What do we actually learn about the child?

A lengthy assessment might tell us that a child has poor school attendance, uses cannabis, associates with peers who offend, has experienced family difficulties and has previously been arrested.

All of those things may be relevant, but do they tell us who the child is? Do we know what matters to them? What they are good at? Who they trust? How they understand what happened? What they think other people think about them? Whether they see offending as part of who they are or something they are beginning to leave behind? Can we see changes in confidence, belonging, relationships, identity or hope?

Perhaps most importantly, can we see whether the work we are doing with the child is actually contributing to those changes?

These things are considerably harder to capture than whether an appointment occurred or an intervention was completed. Yet, from a Child First perspective, they may be considerably more important.

The administrative pull of youth justice

There is a danger that assessment becomes less about understanding and increasingly about demonstrating that assessment has taken place. That distinction matters.

Modern youth justice practitioners operate within systems that understandably demand accountability. Services need to demonstrate appropriate responses to risk, defensible decision-making and compliance with national and local expectations. Inspection also has an important role in identifying weak practice and protecting children and communities.

The problem arises when accountability begins to shape practice more strongly than practice shapes accountability.

Practitioners can find themselves recording information because somebody might later expect to see it, rather than because it meaningfully informs their work with the child.

A contact needs recording. A decision needs explaining. An intervention needs evidencing. A review needs completing. Management oversight needs documenting. Another professional needs updating. An assessment field needs populating. Individually, each requirement may be perfectly reasonable. Collectively, they can create an enormous administrative infrastructure around a relatively small amount of time spent with a child.

The danger is not simply that practitioners become busy. It is that the purpose of the work subtly changes.

Are we assessing children or producing evidence of assessment?

This is particularly important when considering inspection.

Inspection should help improve practice. But practitioners and managers inevitably learn what inspectors look for. Organisations adapt accordingly.

Over time, there is a risk that the imagined future reader of an assessment becomes increasingly important.

Will an inspector understand why I made this decision?

Have I evidenced management oversight?

Have I demonstrated professional curiosity?

Is the rationale recorded?

Have I captured the child's voice?

These are legitimate questions. But there is an important difference between being professionally curious and recording evidence that professional curiosity occurred.

There is also a difference between genuinely understanding a child's perspective and inserting a quotation into an assessment box labelled "child's voice".

When those distinctions become blurred, good practice can gradually become a performance of good practice.

Child First should change what we value

This becomes particularly significant as the youth justice system continues to develop its Child First approach.

Child First cannot simply mean adding more questions to an assessment or introducing another new form. If we genuinely take seriously the idea that children should be seen as children, that their strengths should be developed, that collaboration matters and that intervention should support positive outcomes, then our information systems need to reflect those principles.

That may require collecting less information in some areas and better information in others.

For example, rather than repeatedly documenting static descriptions of difficulties, assessment might give greater prominence to change over time.

What is different since we last saw this child?

What has become stronger?

What has become more difficult?

Has their relationship with their family changed?

Has their sense of belonging changed?

What does the child now think about the behaviour that brought them into youth justice?

Are they beginning to imagine a different future?

What evidence do we have that an intervention contributed to any of this?

These questions produce a very different picture from simply recording whether an intervention was delivered.

Identity is particularly difficult to capture

This is where yesterday's conversation became particularly interesting.

Youth justice increasingly recognises the importance of identity. Children can become labelled by systems, communities and sometimes themselves. Moving away from offending may therefore involve more than reducing particular risk factors. It can involve developing alternative identities, relationships and opportunities.

A child may move from seeing themselves as "someone who is always in trouble" towards seeing themselves as an apprentice, footballer, brother, musician, student or simply someone capable of doing something different.

That change may be hugely significant, yet our systems are much better at recording an arrest than recording a developing identity. We can count appointments. We can record intervention sessions. We can document compliance.

It is much harder to capture that a child who barely spoke during their first appointment is now contributing to their own plan. Or that they have begun talking differently about their future. Or that a relationship with a trusted adult has strengthened. Or that they no longer describe offending as something inevitable.

Those changes may not fit neatly into conventional performance measures.

That does not make them less important.

The problem with measuring what is easy

Public services naturally gravitate towards things that can be counted.

Contacts, assessments, reviews, reoffending rates and completion rates can all be converted into data. Identity, trust, hope, belonging and relational change are much harder to quantify.

The danger is familiar: what can be measured becomes what matters, rather than finding ways of understanding what matters.

This can have consequences for practitioners too. Every hour spent producing evidence for the system is an hour unavailable for something else. That might be direct work with a child, speaking with a parent, visiting a school, consulting with colleagues, reflecting on a difficult case or simply thinking.

Thinking time is particularly vulnerable because it produces no obvious administrative output…Yet good assessment requires it.

Formulation requires practitioners to move beyond gathering information towards asking what that information means. Why might this behaviour be happening? What purpose might it serve? What relationships or environments maintain it? What strengths could support change? What does the child understand differently from the adults around them?

A system can contain enormous quantities of information while still producing relatively little understanding.

This is not an argument for poor recording

None of this means that youth justice should stop documenting practice or that inspection is unnecessary.

Children deserve accountable services. Decisions about liberty, safeguarding and public protection must be properly reasoned and recorded. Poor recording can itself create risk.

The challenge is proportionality and purpose.

For every piece of information we require practitioners to collect, perhaps we should be able to answer three questions:

Why do we need to know this?

How will knowing it improve our understanding or our work with this child?

Who will actually use it?

If the primary answer is "because it might be inspected", we should at least question whether the requirement remains justified.

Designing assessment around practice rather than administration

The current discussion about the future of youth justice assessment therefore presents an important opportunity.

The temptation with redesign is to take everything we currently collect and build a better interface around it. That would improve usability, but it would not necessarily improve assessment.

A genuinely Child First redesign should begin one stage earlier and ask what information practitioners actually need to understand children, make defensible decisions, collaborate with them and recognise meaningful change. It should also ask what can be removed.

Every new field has a cost. Every mandatory question takes practitioner time. Every additional recording expectation potentially shifts attention away from something else.

Sometimes the most progressive redesign is not adding another section, it is deciding that something no longer needs to be there.

What is the assessment actually for?

Ultimately, perhaps this is the question we need to keep returning to.

A youth justice assessment should not simply be a comprehensive repository of everything known about a child. Nor should its primary purpose be demonstrating to a future inspector that the correct processes occurred.

It should help us understand the child well enough to make better decisions with them and about them.

That requires information about risk and safety. It requires professional accountability. It requires good recording.

But it also requires curiosity, interpretation, relationships and an ability to recognise change that cannot always be reduced to a tick box or performance indicator.

Youth justice does not necessarily need more information.

It may need to become much clearer about which information matters, why we are collecting it and what we intend to do with it.

Because an assessment can be administratively complete and still tell us remarkably little about the child at its centre.