News story

How evidence is building a better youth justice system

A blog by Steph Roberts-Bibby, Chief Executive of the Youth Justice Board, on the Child First decision-making framework

From:: Youth Justice Board for England and Wales
Published:: 12 October 2026

Over the last thirty years, research has considerably strengthened our understanding of what helps children move away from offending. Research on child development, desistance, identity, relationships, participation and the effects of contact with the justice system points in a broadly consistent direction. It shows that if we focus on helping children’s positive growth, we will also reduce offending and make communities safer, and that will critically mean fewer victims.

Bringing evidence together

The Youth Justice Board (YJB) advocated for the ‘Child First decision-making framework’ to bring this extensive evidence base together and make it accessible and applicable for busy frontline practitioners. This framework encourages services to adopt policies and practices that are evidence-based and are according to four tenets which can be easily understood and remembered through ‘ABCD’[1]:

A - As children	Prioritise the best interests of children and recognising their particular needs, capacities, rights and potential. All work is child-focused, developmentally informed, acknowledges structural barriers and meets responsibilities towards children.
B - Building pro-social identity	Promote children’s individual strengths and capacities to develop their pro-social identity for sustainable desistance, leading to safer communities and fewer victims. All work is constructive and future-focused, built on supportive relationships that empower children to fulfil their potential and make positive contributions to society.
C - Collaborating with children	Encourage children’s active participation, engagement and wider social inclusion. All work is a meaningful collaboration with children and their carers.
D - Diverting from stigma	Promote a childhood removed from the justice system, using pre-emptive prevention, diversion and minimal intervention. All work minimises criminogenic stigma from contact with the system.

Early criticism of the traditional ‘risk-focused’ approach to crime by children argued that children should be viewed as children rather than offenders. This criticism helped build a strong case for reform, culminating in a major summary of modern youth justice research in 2018 by Haines and Case[2].

That evidence led to the key principles of the Child First framework. Originally, this model was named “Child First, Offender Second,” but the YJB dropped the “Offender Second” phrase in 2021 to ensure the primary focus remained entirely on supporting the child as the most effective way to reduce offending and make communities safer.

Engaging with challenge

In a recent academic paper, Burns and Smithson argue that Child First risks operating as a “magic concept” that offers a “veneer of progress” while “masking enduring structural inequalities”. They further claim that the framework is “resistant to scrutiny and lacking in operational clarity”[3].

Children involved in the youth justice system are certainly among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in our society[4]. These children have often been born into difficult circumstance and failed on many levels, throughout education, interactions with social care and policing, as well as limited engagement with necessary health services. The evidence shows that these challenges are significantly more acute for care-experienced children and those from a Black or Mixed heritage background. These challenges must remain central to any account of how the youth justice system operates.

However, the persistence of these structural problems does not demonstrate that the Child First framework has concealed or legitimised them. Youth justice services (YJSs) and the YJB cannot single-handedly determine welfare, housing, education or economic policy. We can, and do, identify the effects of those policies, challenge them where agencies have influence and avoid reproducing them through our own decisions and the decisions of YJSs.

The Child First framework should be considered in the context of what it can reasonably influence: how children are understood and treated, whether work with a child is individualised and age-appropriate, whether participation is meaningful, whether unnecessary system contact is avoided and whether services work effectively together. And critically whether adults honour their responsibilities to meet children’s rights.

The insistence that all work with children should be ‘meaningful’ is hardwired into tenet C (Collaborating). By requiring that every activity be collaborative and impactful we guard against approaches being tokenistic. We also recognise that just because every person under 18 is classed as a child under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) it does not mean that childhood is a single, uniform experience. Universal child status and rights are entirely compatible with recognising that children experience childhood differently because of ethnicity, gender, disability, poverty, care experience, trauma and other circumstances. No two children are the same and their needs and strengths will differ. Tenet A, seeing children as children, explicitly requires personalised assessments, interventions and practice that understand these differences and the structural barriers children face.

Recognising the different context in Wales

Any assessment of the Child First framework and its implementation must also differentiate between England and Wales.

Wales takes a very different approach to the UNCRC and has always viewed youth justice through a children’s rights approach[5]. Wales was also the first UK nation to appoint a Children’s Commissioner and has been at the forefront of implementing trauma-informed approaches. International and national evidence clearly shows that diversion of children away from the formal criminal justice system, and into supportive interventions, is the most effective way to reduce crime and in Wales almost two thirds (63%) of total outcomes were diversionary outcomes with YJS involvement[6].

Evidence of changes in practice

In 2022, the YJB updated its case management guidance to help services and the broader youth justice system put national standards into practice. Grounded in the Child First evidence base and modern research, this update was developed over three years of close collaboration with youth justice practitioners, policymakers, academics, children, and young adults.

Insights from children and young adults with lived experience in the justice system were essential to shaping the guidance. In response to their input, we included detail such as prompts for practitioners to ask children directly what support matters most to them. We also fundamentally shifted away from a deficit-oriented focus on risk management and towards a constructive model that empowers children to make a positive contribution to their communities.

The operationalisation of the Child First evidence-base has also fundamentally reshaped the standards and methodologies employed by statutory inspection bodies. Historically, HM Inspectorate of Probation alongside joint inspectorates such as Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission, heavily prioritised risk management, procedural compliance, and public protection risk models, whereas their Welsh counterparts; Estyn, Care Inspectorate Wales, and Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, often operated within a framework that balanced risk with a more holistic, preventative, and well-being-focused ethos. The evidence, including developmental psychology and what works to prevent offending, has informed a contemporary inspection framework that closely aligns with Child First tenets. Inspectors now look for evidence that children are not defined solely by their offending behaviour. They evaluate the authenticity of child co-production in sentence planning, as well as the efficacy of Out-of-Court Resolution pathways in diverting children from formal court processing.

This is reflected in recent inspection findings which highlight that services genuinely embedding the Child First framework demonstrate higher levels of engagement, improved multi-agency collaboration, and better long-term desistance outcomes[7].

Last year, we published independent research by Crest Advisory to understand more about how the how the Child First framework is applied in YJSs.[8] One area it explored was whether practitioners’ awareness and understanding of the Child First framework was influenced by the guidance and training available to them. The results were that 86% of practitioners surveyed felt that clear guidance had been an enabler to implementing the Child First framework. Presented with this evidence it is hard to accept criticism that the framework is “lacking in operational clarity” (Burns and Smithson)[9].

Children participating in Crest’s research generally described positive relationships and feeling understood and involved. Crest did identify inconsistency in some areas of practice and barriers created by differences between agencies. However, the research also found high levels of confidence in the application of the four tenets, particularly in out-of-court and community settings. This is not to say that the framework is not getting a foothold in courts. We continue to work alongside the Crown Prosecution Service and HM Courts and Tribunals Service to ensure that children are not only seen as distinct from adults but treated as such. The Youth Justice Resource Hub is full of examples of local innovation with regards to ensuring that the court experience is more child-focused.[10] This is yet another example of collaborative cross-sector activity that is translating the evidence-base into practice.

The Crest Advisory research concluded with a series of recommendations aiming to support future improvements to practice and address variation in implementation. We welcomed this, as the trajectory of the Child First framework is one of constant evolution and we have never shied away from constructive scrutiny.

Recent research by Hanman and O’Connor also provides important evidence about the implementation of the Child First framework at a local level[11]. Youth justice practitioners describe moving away from work organised primarily around offences, deficits and standard programmes towards practice centred on children’s development, strengths, relationships, participation and futures. This was reflected not only in direct work but also in assessment, recording, supervision, reparation, mentoring, programme design and resource allocation.

Children involved in the same research described concrete differences. These included being listened to before an assessment was completed, being offered activities based on their interests rather than solely on their offence, and receiving support into education, training or employment.

The Hanman and O’Connor study provides further credible evidence that implementation of the Child First framework can move beyond policy language and affect what practitioners do and what children experience. It also found that YJSs could not sustain Child First in isolation. Police, courts, education, health and social care were not always adapting at the same pace, while poverty, housing problems, exclusion from school and limited local provision continued to constrain the support available.

Change across the wider system

While the YJB is unable to enact policy to address some of these structural issues, which quite rightly remain the responsibility of broader Government, we have made huge inroads in our work with partner agencies to embed the tenets of the Child First framework. To this end, we established the Child First Toolkit as a practical tool to support wider system understanding and implementation of the Child First evidence base. For example, services guided by the Child First tenets are tackling long-standing health inequalities by embedding specialists, such as speech and language therapists, CAMHS practitioners, and substance misuse experts, directly into their teams. This integrated approach enables early, non-stigmatising screening during initial assessments, addressing underlying trauma, communication needs, and mental health needs.

Developments in policing also challenge the suggestion that the Child First framework has led only to superficial changes. For one thing, it has certainly contributed towards operationalising child-led policing. The recent evaluation of the Child First Custody Pilot (CHIRP) - which combined Child First training with more robust scrutiny of detention, earlier access to legal advice, child-specialist support and efforts to reduce the time children spent in custody - found that training contributed to changes in professional behaviour and fewer children being detained, while also identifying areas requiring further development, including specialist legal advice and stronger multi-agency involvement. This a significant departure to how the police historically worked with children and is about far more than painting a custody suite a more welcoming colour.

Minimising formal justice system contact wherever possible is crucial, which means making good use of early intervention and diversion. HM Inspectorate of Probation[12] has called for greater national consistency across England and Wales in how diversion is used, and we will continue to work with our partners to support this. This includes our work with the Metropolitan Police to extend its Deferred Prosecution Scheme to selected knife possession offences and the work we are doing with Police and services in Wales. Government guidance published in 2026 now expects all police forces to make deferred prosecution available for selected child knife possession cases where it is appropriate and prosecution or a Youth Conditional Caution would not be suitable. Since April 2026, these cases are recorded nationally under the new Outcome 23.

We also worked closely with the National Police Chief’s Council in the development of its revised Child Gravity Matrix, launched in 2023. This resource enhances the decision-making process for the police when working with children and reflects a commitment to fairness, equity and a more holistic approach to addressing the complex needs of children in contact with the justice system. Challenges do of course remain, particularly with regards to building trust between the police and families and children[13], but support for child-centred policing is growing.

Bringing together fragmented systems around the child

The Burns and Smithson critique of the Child First framework is right to point to other countries where education, welfare and justice are more fully integrated at a national level. As described earlier, Wales is one such positive example, but England still has a way to go. In England, national responsibilities for education, health and social care remain relatively siloed in different government departments, but children’s lives do not follow these departmental boundaries. At a local level YJSs have increasingly sought to bridge those institutional boundaries around the individual child.

YJSs were established as statutory multi-agency partnerships before the formal adoption of the Child First framework. However, its emphasis on understanding children holistically has reinforced it and helped drive further integration around children’s needs and strengths. YJSs must include, or have access to, expertise from police, probation, children’s social care, education and health. Depending on local arrangements, teams may also bring together early help, family support, mental health, speech and language therapy, substance misuse, exploitation and adolescent services, housing and voluntary-sector provision.

This integration can be seen in YJSs located within wider children’s, prevention or adolescent teams, where practitioners can draw on specialist provision without requiring children and families to navigate multiple disconnected services.

This does not mean that services are fully integrated everywhere or that local partnerships can compensate for fragmented national funding streams and services. Access to consistent education, safe housing and mental health support continues to vary. But those limitations should not obscure the significant amount of local work being done to organise services around children rather than around institutional boundaries.

Progress and lessons for the adult system

I am confident that the long-term trajectory of the youth justice system is positive.

In 2026, the YJB published data on the use of diversions[14] for the first time, which showed that nearly half of YJS outcomes were resolved without a caution or formal court outcome. Fewer children than ever before are entering the youth justice system for the first time, and in 2024/25 there was an average of 430 children in custody at any one time during the year, a fall of 3% against the previous year[15] . This is the lowest number on record.

These developments have multiple causes and should not be attributed to the Child First framework alone. The reduction in children entering the formal system began before the framework was formally adopted and reflects changes in policing, diversion, sentencing, partnership working, prevention and wider professional practice. The figures are however consistent with a system that has increasingly prioritised prevention, diversion and community-based responses.

The value of the framework becomes particularly clear when youth justice is compared with the adult system. Dame Anne Owers’ Independent Review of Prison Capacity[16] emphasised that the adult system could learn from youth justice, attributing the dramatic reduction of children in custody to a preventative, multidisciplinary approach extending beyond criminal justice to health, education, local authorities and family support, with custody used as a last resort.

Isabelle Trowler’s review of safeguarding in youth custody[17] also attributed Child First as a unifying framework central to the success of the youth justice system, and something which the secure estate could learn from in order to improve outcomes.

Where further work is needed

That is not to say challenges do not exist. The YJB-commissioned research by Crest Advisory[18] indicates the need for further work to ensure consistent national implementation of the Child First evidence base in practice. The Hanman and O’Connor (2026) report highlights the importance of alignment from partner agencies, including the police, courts, social care and education. This will help to tackle external factors such as poverty, housing instability, school exclusions and limited social service provision, which continue to constrain what can realistically be offered to a child, regardless of a YJS’s internal commitment.

Another ongoing task is reassuring partners and the general public that the Child First framework is not contrary to victims’ rights. The Child First evidence base is about what works to achieve positive outcomes for all parties: children, victims, and communities alike. This remains equally applicable to children who commit serious offences, who often present complex needs and require support to turn their lives around. Understanding brain development, trauma, and identity is essential to reducing reoffending and keeping communities safe with fewer victims. The youth justice system and the services within it have an important responsibility to victims – to listen to them, support them, mitigate the impacts on them and their communities and to work together to prevent further crimes and victimisation. We are helping develop services to victims through consultation with victims’ organisations, working closely and collaboratively with the victims’ sector and HM Inspectorate of Probation to understand how to better meet the needs of victims and by sharing examples of positive practice.

As we transition into a national continuous improvement body, our focus on evidence and frontline practice support will sharpen. We are proud of what has been achieved alongside the youth justice sector over the past three decades and are strongly motivated by what we will achieve together going forward, continuing to reduce offending by children through evidence-led practice and strong partnership delivery. The Child First framework will continue to provide a foundation for challenging aspects of the system that remain inconsistent with the evidence, whether in custody, unequal access to diversion, meaningful participation, responses to victims or wider questions about how and when children enter the criminal justice system.

Conclusion

Academic critique is vital; the Child First evidence-base itself grew out of academic research, and constructive discourse keeps public systems accountable. Burns and Smithson are right that adopting progressive language is not, by itself, evidence of reform. However, dismissing Child First as a ‘magic concept’ ignores decades of progress and evidence of changes to frontline practice by skilled youth justice practitioners.

Child First is a practical, evidence-led approach that has helped achieve historic drops in child crime and custody rates. By bridging the implementation gap across wider statutory partners, strengthening the evidence base, and supporting victims, we can ensure every child in contact with the system gets the opportunity to build a positive future, and as a result reduces victims and creates safer communities.

[1] Child First Overview and Guide

[2] (PDF) Children First, Offenders Second: The Centrality of Engagement in Positive Youth Justice

[3] The veneer of progress: Child First as a ‘magic concept’ for youth justice systems - Samantha Burns, Hannah Smithson, 2026

[4] Review of the youth justice system - GOV.UK

[5] https://www.gov.wales/childrens-rights-in-wales

[6] The use of diversionary outcomes with youth justice service involvement - GOV.UK

[7] An inspection of youth justice work with children and victims in Bridgend – HM Inspectorate of Probation

[8] Applying the Child First framework in youth justice services - GOV.UK

[9] The veneer of progress: Child First as a ‘magic concept’ for youth justice systems - Samantha Burns, Hannah Smithson, 2026

[10] A quiet revolution: how courts in England and Wales are adopting the Child First decision-making framework - Youth Justice Resource Hub

[11] Item - Assessing the impact of Child First justice - Loughborough University - Figshare

[12] The effectiveness of diverting children from the criminal justice system: meeting needs, ensuring safety, and preventing reoffending, An inspection by HM Inspectorate of Probation and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services