Youth offending - scaled approach

Youth offending - scaled approach

Scaled approach – a new approach to youth justice

In November 2009, the Government’s new Youth Community Sentencing structure came into force. The Youth Rehabilitation Order (YRO) offers courts greater flexibility, giving them a range of options that address a child's or young person’s offending and aims to respond to the victims’ needs.

To support the YRO, the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (YJB), in partnership with youth offending teams (YOTs), has developed a new model of working for youth justice practitioners - known as the "Scaled Approach".  

These major changes affect everyone working in youth justice or wider services for young people. They offer a significant opportunity to tackle risk of reoffending and also represent a chance to improve partnership-working and public confidence in effective community sentencing.

The Scaled Approach: how it makes a difference

The Scaled Approach is a programme of work that has different levels of interventions based on risk of reoffending and risk of serious harm.

This aims to ensure that interventions are tailored to the individual. The key benefits are that interventions can be better targeted and, ultimately, offending and risk of serious harm can be reduced.

The YRO represents a more individualised risk- and needs-based approach to community sentencing, enabling greater choice from a ‘menu’ of requirements. The YRO will replace nine old community sentences and will simplify the juvenile sentencing structure, enabling sentencers to tailor sentences to individual risk and needs. It can be used again on multiple occasions.  If offending continues, the YRO programmes become stronger and restrict liberty more.

If used effectively, the YRO should not only help reduce reoffending, but should also contribute to a reduction in the number of young people in custody.

Working together

The success of the Scaled Approach depends on quality assessments of young people. Rigorous assessment will help inform YOS's reports to courts and youth offender panels. These reports provide additional information for the court even as sentencer focus remains on the seriousness of the offence and the purposes of sentencing.

Using YOS recommendations and experience, sentencers can select from the 18 requirements available under the YRO. This will enable the young person to engage with interventions most likely to address their offending behaviour. The emphasis on reparation within the YRO underpins a commitment to ensuring young people make amends for their behaviour.

The following requirements can attached to a YRO

• Activity Requirement 
• Supervision Requirment   
• Curfew Requirement
• Electronic Monitoring Requirement
• Exclusion Requirement
• Prohibited Activity Requirement
• Local Authority Residence Requirement
• Drug Treatment Requirement
• Education Requirement
• Residence Requirement
• Mental Health Treatment Requirement
• Programme Requirement
• Unpaid Work Requirement (16/17 years)
• Attendance Centre Requirement
• Drug Testing Requirement
• Instensive Supervision and Surveillance (based on the current ISSP)
• Intoxicating Substance Treatment Requirement
• Intensive Fostering