Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): I welcome to the meeting Stephen Martin, chief executive of the Youth Justice Agency (YJA). Stephen, last time you were with us, you did not get to do very much of the talking but you will today. We also have Mary Aughey, the director of the Woodlands Juvenile Justice Centre and Colleen Heaney, the director of youth justice services. Thank you very much for taking the time to be with us. I apologise that we have run slightly over with the previous item, but that is fairly standard with the Justice Committee. We are all fairly engaged in the issues. You will also be afforded the similar courtesy of us being engaged with the issues that you bring to us. I invite you to give your presentation and doubtless there will be questions afterwards.

Mr Stephen Martin (Youth Justice Agency): Thank you, Chair. I will adapt what I was planning to say in response to what you have just heard. We have done a lot on trauma-informed practice and are seen as a bit of an exemplar in Northern Ireland. We can share some of that and some of the material on crisis as well.

Thanks very much for the opportunity. We have done a lot in this space with no resources so we are really delighted to share what we have done. I will start by focusing on mental health issues before going on to talk about our business plan. Brevity is not my strong suit, but I will try to be brief.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Ours neither, so it is fine.

Mr Martin: In our experience, children involved in offending behaviour often have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and trauma and face issues with their mental health. Those mental health issues can contribute to offending behaviour, so finding ways to address them is really important to help improve a child's life chances and reduce the likelihood and impact of further offending. The health and social care system, as you have just discussed, has statutory responsibility for the provision of mental health services to children. However, we were finding that, in our experience, mainstream child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) in the community were not meeting the needs of many of the vulnerable children whom we work with. Many children were failing to engage and were being discharged for missing appointments.

Around five years ago, we started working with the Southern Health and Social Care Trust to pilot a different model whereby we co-funded a mental health practitioner who was embedded in the Youth Justice Agency. With the support of our staff, that practitioner brings the service to children and tailors it to meet their needs. The results of our pilot were incredible. In the year before the pilot, only 14% of children who we referred to CAMHS completed a programme with improvements in their mental health. That jumped to 88% in the first year of the pilot. Given that success, we have moved with other trusts to roll out the model. On the crisis point, in the six months before that pilot, 12 of our children had to be seen by the CAMHS crisis team. In the six months after the pilot, no children did. It had a really significant impact.

YJA CAMHS is funded on a 50:50 basis, but neither the trusts nor YJA has budget for that. So far, I have been able to find our share through savings that have been generated as a result of the difficulties that we have faced in filling posts in the organisation in a timely way, but I am obviously really keen to find a more sustainable funding solution.

The position is slightly different in the Woodlands Juvenile Justice Centre, of which Mary is the director, where we have statutory responsibility to ensure that healthcare, including mental healthcare, is provided. That is delivered through Acorn, which is multidisciplinary mental health and therapeutic care service. All children who are admitted to Woodlands are offered an Acorn assessment. That is used to inform a tailored package of support when a child is in Woodlands. Where needed, referrals are made for prompt follow-up with step-3 CAMHS when a child returns to the community. I know that that was a particular point with regard to adults, but we have seen that a child is not released if they need ongoing mental health support. So far, they have been getting it.

Importantly for us, we also have access to the forensic child and adolescent mental health service for Northern Ireland for young people who present with complex needs and significant public safety issues. While there is only a small number of children who meet that threshold, we really value that service. It is important to us that it remains available. We have prepared some case studies in our pack, but it might be difficult to share them in the oral session. We are happy to send those to the Committee afterwards.

I will move on briefly to our business plan. Most of the plan remains on track to be achieved. That is because of the skilled professionalism and dedication of our staff. I am blessed to have an absolutely brilliant staff team. I am pleased that that was recognised by Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland (CJINI) in the 'Youth Interventions: An Inspection of the Youth Justice Agency's Community Interventions' report that it published last week. In that report, CJINI also recognised our contribution over several years to significantly reducing the number of children who enter the formal justice system. That is a major achievement that our current business plan aims to build on. To do that, we need a stable workforce. With significant differentials between the pay of our professionally qualified staff and their counterparts in other public-sector bodies, that is proving really difficult to achieve. There are risks there already that are having an impact on the delivery of some of our business plan targets, which we do not have all the tools to manage ourselves. We are looking for the support of colleagues in the Department and across the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) to help us to address the risk.

Despite those workforce challenges, we continue to be an innovative organisation, seeking to improve what we do for the benefit of children, their families, victims and communities. Our model of practice sets out the Child First principles under which we operate and provides the framework for our programme of continuous improvement. I would like to pick up two strands of the work before I finish off.

The first relates directly to what you just heard about trauma-informed practice. We have made a commitment to become a more trauma-informed organisation. That is important, because, as you have heard, many of the individuals whom we have worked with have experienced trauma — including some of our staff, of course — which impacts on their lives and often contributes, in the case of our service users, to offending behaviour. Working in a trauma-informed way means increasing our understanding of trauma and its impact and designing our services and ways of working accordingly. We are well along the journey, and, in the case study that your research colleagues mentioned, we are seen as an exemplar of practice. We are one of the case study examples, and we have worked with Trauma Informed Oregon, one of the world leaders in this. We have just completed self-assessment. We are happy to share more about this, and Colleen has been leading our work on this and has done an absolutely fantastic job. It also translates into our well-being programmes for staff and our well-being support. Trauma-informed practice is not just how we work with victims, service users and families; it is how we work with and support each other.

I would like to highlight the second area, and that is participation. This is an important seam that runs through most aspects of our work. Through our participation champions, we have made real strides in involving children and families who use our services, helping improve how we do our work and maximising the impact. Our participation programme has been recognised as good practice by UNICEF and the Children's Commissioner, and we would welcome the opportunity to talk more about it.

I will finish with feedback. We do regular surveys of all our service users. I will finish with feedback from a child in response to one about our services. It is in their own words, so it is not grammatically correct, but I hope you will bear with me:

Thank you, Chair.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Thank you very much, Stephen. I open the Floor to members.

Mr Beattie: Stephen, thank you for your report. I am just looking at your business performance plan. It is very good, but it seems to come up amber all the time with staff and staff vacancies. Can you give us an idea of that situation? What are those staff vacancies? Are you missing people in specific roles? What are your plans to fix that?

Mr Martin: About half of our staff are professionally qualified in either social work or youth work. We have now 15% fewer staff in those areas than we had when I took up post three and a half years ago. There are two main reasons for that. The first is that Northern Ireland has not been training enough social workers for the last 12 years. The second is that we have the worst-paid staff with those professional qualifications in the public sector. I do not speak from a position of self-interest, because I am an administrative civil servant. However, my staff are paid significantly less because our pay deals over the last number of years have been at or below inflation. In other public-sector bodies, pay rises have been at or above inflation. It is simply demand and supply.

Mary Aughey was telling me about one of our senior staff in Woodlands. She got a phone call from a trust offering her a job, without an interview, with a £12,000 pay rise. How can I compete with that? I have a loyal group of staff, but the cost of living is what it is, and we have lost far too many staff. We lost 18 to other employers over the last three years and another six or seven to retirement out of a professional body of 100 staff. We have 200 in total: 100 of those are professionally qualified.

Mr Beattie: I guess that the Probation Board has exactly the same issue. The pay differential between social workers in your sector and in the NHS is a huge issue.

Mr Martin: Probation social workers are paid more than mine.

Mr Beattie: There is competition there. Sometimes competition is healthy, but, when you have not enough, you are just stripping out one to give to another. At the minute, Health seems to pay more, and that is where people are going.

Mr Martin: We have made a case for a retention and recruitment allowance within the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) pay structures, but it is sitting within our Department, and we cannot get it out to give it to HR at the moment. We are hopeful that eventually we can, and that may help. It will help.

Mr Beattie: Is DOJ pushing that case for you at the moment?

Mr Martin: Not at the moment, no.

Mr Beattie: They are not: why not?

Mr Martin: I do not know. I am obviously fighting hard internally to get it pushed, but so far with limited success.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Do you want us to correspond with the Department on it?

Mr Beattie: I think so. We are here to scrutinise and support, and that adds support. That is a real issue, and we have heard it before. We have heard from the Probation Board that it is in competition with the Department of Health to keep social workers. If it is even worse where you are — if I look at the indicators, most of them show that we are not hitting targets that we should be because of staff shortages — we should write.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Do members agree?

Ms Ferguson: First, I commend you all again. You were here before, and I am taken aback not only by the success that you have had but by the innovative practice of putting the child first, having a wrap-around team and, in particular, the figures that you achieved just by going ahead, without funding, and bringing in a mental health practitioner. I am taken aback by the transformation that that decision alone could make to the lives of young people.

We are very focused on mental health, but I am conscious that a child's needs do not just come down to mental health. There is usually a range of needs, whether they are to do with the family or the trauma that a child may experience leading up to something. One area that you mentioned seeing a high increase in was moderate and severe learning difficulties. I am interested to find out what is being done in that area through Youth Justice. Are there any barriers to accessing support from an educational point of view alongside what you currently do through mental health? Is there innovative practice there?

Mr Martin: I will bring Colleen and Mary in on that in a moment. We are in the process of developing our new three-year corporate plan. One of the issues that we have decided to focus on is children with neurodiversity. We recognise that we are doing well in that area, but we can do more. I will bring in Colleen to talk about what we currently do in the community, and then I will bring in Mary to talk about custody.

Ms Colleen Heaney (Youth Justice Agency): Neurodiversity is a key area of development. We are collecting data to get a clear picture of the needs in our population and to be able to plan adequately for that in skills development and training. We also work in partnership with our colleagues in education welfare on appropriate access and support for special education needs (SEN) kids, for example, or kids who have additional needs. That work is ongoing. We expect that that area will grow, because we see an increase in children who present with neurodiverse conditions. We are not sure what that is about. We are still in the learning phase of it. At this stage, it is really about information gathering.

Ms Ferguson: We are well aware of that. We are dealing with a huge number of people who are awaiting their diagnoses and assessments. That can take years. In the work that you do, it will be interesting to ask the people you come across, through their family members, whether they are currently waiting. It is a key area of research.

Ms Heaney: That is part of our conversations. We are collecting data on assessment, on who is on a waiting list and on where their parental concerns are, which may not have gone that far. We are looking at the whole picture to try to understand the need.

Ms Mary Aughey (Youth Justice Agency): At Woodlands, we are extremely lucky — it is nice to put it on record too — in our partnership with the Education Authority (EA). We have education other than at school (EOTAS) at Woodlands. We also have a partnership with Acorn, which is our mental health service. We have an excellent head teacher and a group of teachers who really concentrate on the young people who have special educational needs. They chase up their reports from the community, and they act on those reports and deliver programmes and assessments to help young people while they are with us to the extent that, before their involvement, about 27% of young people who left us went back into education, training or employment, whereas the figure is now 77%. The work that is done while they are in custody has really contributed to preparing young people to go back into the community, having had all their treatment while they were in custody.

Ms Ferguson: Have you done a cost-benefit analysis of that work?

Mr Martin: No, I do not think that we have. To be completely honest, when I took up post, we very much hid our light under a bushel. We did not talk a lot about what we did. We are now trying to put it out there, and we now publish a performance impact report every year. We are trying to do evaluations of some of our programmes. We are planning an evaluation on CAMHS, and we will publish an evaluation of our children’s diversion forums and some of our diversionary work in November. We are trying to build that evidence base and share the practice. We are doing much more than we have done historically.

Mr Dickson: Thank you, Stephen and your team for the incredible work you do. This is probably not going to be very popular in the Justice Department, but, with my trade union hat on, I wonder why there have not been equal pay claims in the public sector for the grading and pay of social workers in that area. I know what the answer is. The answer is the budget, the amount of money that the Department has to spread and the fact that it can only spread that so far. That still should not stand in the way of people having the appropriate pay for the work they do.

I want to ask the team about the niche specialism of working with young people in those circumstances. In order to have trained social workers in Northern Ireland to do that, is there a specific, bespoke course at university that deals with some of the very difficult or particular aspects that you deal with?

Mr Martin: We take people who have a degree-level qualification in social work or youth work and develop their practice when they are with us. We have very good supervision arrangements and have just completed a whole range of training on trauma-informed supervision. It is very much about recruiting raw diamonds. Given what we pay, they are generally new graduates. Over the last few years, we have put a lot of emphasis on internal learning and development. We have just appointed a senior practitioner who will be focused on supporting those early-career social workers and youth workers. It is very much about qualification and then in-house training.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Stewart, are you happy enough?

Mr Dickson: Yes, Chair. That is useful. It is important to hear that there is in-service training. The need to deliver that in-service training to get people to the point where they are making a meaningful contribution to young people's lives has clearly been recognised. That takes us to the disappointing area where they can take that skill set and use it elsewhere, for which they are better paid.

Mr McNulty: Thank you for your evidence today, folks. The Audit Office in its 'Managing children who offend: follow up review' determined that, although progress had been made, it was unable to conclude that the system delivers value for money due to inadequate management systems, with a lack of means to measure and report the impact of its work and insufficient understanding of the costs throughout the youth justice system. That relates a bit to what Ciara said about a cost-benefit analysis. If you are not assessing, you are guessing — what, what, what?

Mr Martin: In response to the Northern Ireland Audit Office's report, there were three recommendations. The first was to have a strategy for youth justice, which was published by the Minister in March 2022, so that has been addressed. The second was more-transparent performance information. As I mentioned, the first report was in November 2021. Every year, we have published a performance impact report that clearly highlights outcomes-based accountability (OBA) information on what we do. That addresses the second issue. The third issue was around costings. Our annual report and accounts are very transparent on what we cost and what we spend. Our economist in the Department tried to do some benchmarking, but it is a pretty complex exercise. There probably is more to be done in that area. However, the first two — more transparency on outcomes-based accountability information and the provision of a strategy — have been fully addressed.

Mr McNulty: Good.

On collaborative working, the report states:

Is that not startling?

Mr Martin: No. The CJINI report says that, operationally, our relationships with the police are excellent, which is absolutely true. We work closely with the youth diversion officers on the ground. The gap that CJINI identified was at a strategy level.

For example, Colleen and I regularly meet our equivalents in the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) to share information about service developments, strategic developments and so on. We do the same thing with the Probation Board. The gap essentially is that we do not have similar mechanisms with the police. In response to that report, my boss, who is the director general of the Northern Ireland Prison Service, wrote to Jon Boutcher to ask for such mechanisms to be set up. We have our first meeting with the police at chief superintendent level next week, and we will try to work out how best to address that recommendation. It is certainly not that there is an operational gap between us and the police. CJINI identified a gap with strategic sharing.

Mr McNulty: Is that not the same thing?

Mr Martin: No. Operationally, CJINI found that we work excellently with the police on individual cases and individual children. It is at the planning, policy and strategic level that CJINI identified a gap, rather than in how we work with the police to support individual children.

Mr McNulty: Operationally, you are driven by your strategies, so I am a bit confused by that.

Mr Martin: No, the issue is more around sharing. What we do with the PPS and the Probation Board, for example, is to meet three or four times a year to share what we are doing. We have that forum to iron out problems at a senior level. CJINI has said that we need to have something similar in place with the police. We do not currently have that, and that is what we are trying to address.

Mr McNulty: So, efforts are afoot to align strategically between CJINI and the police.

Mr Martin: Yes, absolutely.

Mr McNulty: OK. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): I will come in on the back of that one. Stephen, the police recently produced a children and young people strategy. Children were involved in the development of that strategy. There were meetings about it with children at which I was present. Has this issue not been raised through those conversations?

Mr Martin: That is one of the examples that CJINI used. We were not consulted about that strategy; I became aware of it on the day that it was launched. That was used by CJINI as an example of there being a bit of a communication gap at that strategic level. I would be more concerned if there were a gap at the operational level than at the strategic level, but something needs to be done there, and that is what we are trying to do.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Since that was highlighted by CJINI, and having looked at that strategy on the day of its launch, were you content with its contents? Have things improved since then?

Mr Martin: There have been no major issues. Sometimes it is just about aligning. That applies even with what the police mean by "children and young people". The age range that they work with goes beyond that with which we work; we work only with children. I intend to write to the children's champion in the PSNI, Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) Bobby Singleton, about him and I having an annual summit or a meeting to ensure that we are on the same page on some of the issues. I do not see any major dissonance; it is just that we were not fully aware of the strategy.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Key to that, obviously, will be information from the strategy filtering down to the operational tier, and whatever they find at the operational tier being fed back up to the strategic tier.

Mr Martin: Yes.

Miss Hargey: Apologies for being late to the session, but I have read the note. I have a question about the over-representation in the system, particularly, as you outlined, around gender, age, religion — it is stark in terms of young Catholics — and those who are in the care system and have care status. When you gave evidence in March, the reoffending rates were highlighted, because they are similar to the adult rates, which is concerning. On the one hand, it is good that you are doing much more early intervention — I see that in the stats — but there is obviously a synergy between mental health and living arrangements for those who are over-represented in going into the system. I want to see what work is being done. I know that it was said — I think that it was in the QUB report — that historical, operational and attitudinal causes led to some of that issue. Will you give an update on that and on early prevention? If we know that those are the categories where there is over-representation, what can we do further down the line? If there is a breakdown in the joined-up working at a strategic level, is that the same with Health and other Departments? If it is, what work is being done, particularly to keep that focus on prevention?

Mr Martin: We commissioned the work from Queen's that you just mentioned.

Miss Hargey: I know.

Mr Martin: It said, essentially, that the researchers could not determine over-representation for most categories because they did not have enough data, so there is, clearly, a data gap across the justice system. We are doing what we can to improve that in our organisation. That is the first thing.

Miss Hargey: I know, but, in fairness, that has come up in other sessions.

Mr Martin: The thing that, for me, came up strongly was deprivation-linked vulnerabilities. Once the researchers had accounted for deprivation, they found that religious differentials were not statistically significant. Once you accounted for deprivation and need, religion was not statistically significant. That, for me, is the clear issue, and deprivation goes far beyond us. What we can do in tackling it is about preventing children from coming into the system in the first place. You mentioned reoffending. We run a community resolution notices programme with the police. That notice is the very earliest-stage disposal. When we work with a child who has received a community resolution notice, we find that only 9% of such children reoffend within a year and so come back into the system.

The further into the system a child is, the higher the rate of reoffending, so a key thing is to intervene as early as possible. We are seeing that have a really significant impact, but there are children with particular vulnerabilities — children in the care system for example — who very much need a very joined-up approach. We have good relationships with Health. One of our strengths is that, unlike other parts of the justice system, we have strong relationships with Health and Education that are mostly productive. There is joint working to look at how we can address some of those who are particularly vulnerable, such as children in care. Our main focus, however, is on working upstream to prevent children from coming into the formal system. If we can do that, they are less likely to become entrenched, and while that will benefit all children, it will have a greater positive differential impact on the children who are more commonly seen in the system. It will have a really positive impact on those equality groups that are most impacted.

Miss Hargey: Social class is not categorised as a group, so it is about — you touched on deprivation — how you capture that outside what is listed here under gender, age and religion.

Mr Martin: Queen's used locality: the areas of deprivation.

Miss Hargey: If you are trying to look at that by way of prevention, do you do a heat mapping exercise? We know those areas, such as DFC neighbourhood renewal areas and areas at risk. Maybe I will follow up with you on that —

Mr Martin: We do not, particularly, but, even before community resolution notices, we have a schools programme. We work with schools that are primarily in areas where we have our highest caseload, which tend to be the areas of highest deprivation. The schools will come to us, or we will go to the schools with issues that, we think, need to be addressed. About 40% of the offences that we deal with are violence against the person. Whether through one-punch programmes, substance misuse programmes or consequential thinking, we will work with schools. That tends to be targeted at the areas of highest deprivation.

Miss Hargey: On the reoffending bit — I know that this might be in a different category — one of the issues is connection to school. If connection to school is one of the downsides, i.e. there is no connection to school, maybe the prevention work needs to be wider. I will follow up separately, if there is an official who deals with that. It would be good just to know that there is, and then we could make contact.

Mr Martin: Yes, absolutely. It will be one of us.

Miss Hargey: Thank you.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): My turn. I have just a few things to go through with you, if that is all right. You heard the presentation that we had. I am interested in the number of children whom you engage with who have learning difficulties and who have had adverse childhood experiences. I am not asking you for that information now, necessarily, but it would be helpful for us to have some understanding. Of the cohort that you have, how many are impacted by the types of issues that we have discussed, such as speech and language issues? You touched on the special educational needs and the attendance at school. I was interested in that, because, Mary, you gave us some statistics that were startling. Of children who were not attending school, 77% of them left your facility —.

Ms Aughey: It went from 27% not engaging to 77% engaging on leaving.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): I am wondering whether that should make us return to first principles, because, for a long time, the theory was to put children with learning difficulties into mainstream education. I have close links to some schools for children with moderate and severe learning difficulties, and the children who go to those schools are inordinately happy and are achieving great things and good results. It is a very nurturing environment. I wonder whether part of the issue is that, when children with learning difficulties are put into mainstream education, they are not able to keep up or to cope and feel out of place. Is it an issue that perhaps they would have been better served had they attended a different school setting? Do you think that that is a possibility and is work being done around re-examining that?

Mr Martin: That would be beyond our competence for comment.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Yes, I understand that, but I ask that based on what you have seen. It is bizarre that, for children who are not attending school, the figure of 14% increases dramatically to 77% of them achieving great results.

Ms Aughey: In fairness, Chair, when children are in custody and with us, they engage in education because they are a captive audience. Well over 90% to 100% of children go to school every day in Woodlands. We have the advantage of having small classes. We also have the advantage of being able to deliver bespoke education to young people; others do not have the luxury of that on the outside. It means that they are then better prepared to go back out to the world of education, training or employment.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Presumably, not going to school results in them getting into trouble because they have a lot of spare time on their hands. In your case studies with them and the conversations that you have with them about why they were not going to school in the first place, what factors do they tell you about? What are they telling you about why they did not go to school and how school made them feel?

Ms Heaney: There is a range of issues. Some can be mental health, crisis at home or child carers. There is a plethora of issues, but I suppose, anecdotally, we have very few children who do not engage in education where that education is in a special school, as you described. Off the top of my head, I am aware of a few cases where we have had a child who was referred for their offending behaviour and was attending a special school, and the response from the school has been completely different. They have worked brilliantly in partnership with youth justice on how they intervene and support that child. It is unusual that we see children who are engaged in that type of educational setting being referred into the system. Where they have disengaged, there is a range of issues. Some of them are where there is an unmet or undiagnosed need in terms of their education.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): That is why I wonder whether, sometimes, we are missing a trick and, because of a stigma or pride issue, putting children into a mainstream school when it is maybe not the best place for them and their outcomes.

Ciara, do you want in, briefly?

Ms Ferguson: Just on that issue, there is practice on that, under the tackling paramilitarism programme through DE. In the greater Shantallow area, I ran a similar programme, which is still being run. It is for that small cohort of pupils in mainstream education who will be suspended or expelled and are not attending school. They are taken out, and there is a specialised programme in the community. It is a small group, but it is really successful. Pieces of work are being done, but, as you said, it is not replicated across other areas and other schools because it is constant pilot schemes. That may be something that we could follow up through DE, under the tackling paramilitarism programme and other pieces of work, because really good work is being done for that small cohort of people who will end up in your system. More early intervention work could be done in schools. The preschools and primary schools know of those individuals. They could be identified and tracked, but organisations are helpless in being able to support that individual. The earlier that we can get in, intervene and provide that wrap-around support, the better.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): There are issues for first-time parents, too, who do not necessarily recognise the signs.

Ms Ferguson: Of course.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): It is up to the professionals and the childcare people who have the experience and see it.

It is a difficult conversation to have with first-time parents too. We are mindful of all that.

Bearing in mind the conversation that we have just had with the Research and Information Service (RaISe), what percentage of people in your facilities should essentially be in receipt of treatment rather than incarceration? You may not have that figure, and, in that case, it is fine to send it in.

Mr Martin: There are no low- or medium-secure mental health facilities for children in Northern Ireland. I have some figures with me, which I just need to find. It is something like six or eight. They are small numbers, Chair. I cannot lay my hands on the figures. Mary probably has them.

Ms Aughey: Seven in seven years.

Mr Martin: That is, in seven years, seven children who were with us at one stage and are now in an extra-contractual referral in England for low- or medium-secure mental health facilities. They are in that because we do not have such facilities in Northern Ireland and they have been referred there. It is not a vast number, but, when they are with us, it is complex to manage them in a justice setting. The Committee may be aware of this: the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People (NICCY) produced a report last year or the year before called 'A Failed Child', which was the story of Vicky in the Western Trust, who spent time with us. It tracks her from birth right through and all the missed opportunities to support Vicky. She spent a considerable time with us, and we were never an appropriate facility. It does not happen often, but, when it does, it can have a massive impact on the child, their family and us.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): One of the things that occurred to me as I read through your work is the fact that the aim here is to keep children out of custody at all costs. You have told us and written to us to indicate that any children in your care are not released unless the support systems are set up and the children are able to avail themselves of support systems and all the things that people need to stay on track when they are with you. I wonder, then, whether that is the case for those who are on the fringes of the system but have not yet reached you. Does the fact that they cannot access the service result in them hitting your door? That is maybe an issue for RaISe. Do you know what I am saying?

Mr Martin: That is definitely the case, Chair. We have a parents group, and I met parents recently down in Woodlands. One of the parents said to me that their reaction, when their child ended up in Woodlands, was, "Phew, finally they are going to get some support". I have heard that several times. A child, at some points, needs to reach custody or certainly to enter our system to get the support that they need. It is not justice support but mental health or substance misuse support.

Importantly, we do not just work with the child. We try, as far as our resources permit, to work with the whole family and take a whole-family approach. Our workers are not there 24/7: the family is. A lot of what we do is to support the family with the tools, expertise, experience and tips to manage and support their young person.

We also do some quite innovative things. We have a small discretionary fund called "early stage diversion strand 1", and our staff can apply for up to £500 per child for particular things to support that child. A really simple example, which I always cite because I think that it is really powerful, involves a child who, because of their mental health issues, acted out violently. Our staff worked with them on coping mechanisms and techniques. That £500 was used in part for a punchbag in the young man's room, with a pair of boxing gloves. He knew that, if he needed to de-stress, rather than punch his brother or mum, he went into the room and punched the punchbag so that he was not reoffending. We might have seen that child again and again. That example shows how the really small and innovative use of a little money, along with that broader support from our staff, made a tremendous difference.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): I have a question about that. I have been working my way through the report since we got it. There is a reference to a report from Queen's University on children's diversion forums. When do you anticipate that report being published?

Mr Martin: I have just written the foreword to it, and it will go to print in the next couple of weeks, so it should be ready to launch. We hope to have an event in November. As it is a multi-agency forum, we will try to use that as an opportunity to strengthen some of those partnerships.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): Thank you. There is a reference to a pilot in Newry. Let me find that. For members who are following along, it is on page 96 of the Committee papers. I need to find where it is in the report so that I can tell you, Stephen. It states:

What types of offences and behaviours are you looking at for that?

Mr Martin: Colleen, do you want to pick that up?

Ms Heaney: It is offences that would typically have attracted diversionary youth conference. That will be decided by the PPS, but the threshold would be anything that does not attract court disposal. The PPS is the gatekeeper of the appropriateness of referrals.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): That is helpful. I suspect that we will want to be updated on that pilot to see how it goes.

Please bear with me as I work through the report. It states:

What are the figures around that, please? Do you know, or can you send them?

Mr Martin: Our workload statistics will be published by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) next Thursday. I have not seen them yet. However, every year, roughly, 100 to 120 children are admitted to custody. The majority are on remand or PACE. We would not necessarily agree with the point that others raise. Do you want to pick up on that, Mary?

Ms Aughey: A lot of our children do not end up getting custodial sentences at the end of their remand, because, technically, they have served time, and the work has been done with those young people. Had they not been on remand for that period and had the work not been completed, they would have received a custodial sentence. Therefore, that is not a true reflection of what occurs, because, had they been in court on the first week after the offence was committed, they would have been sentenced to custody. However, because they spent time on remand, they have done that work, basically.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): It is an entirely different situation from adults, who are essentially encouraged not to engage; children are encouraged.

Ms Aughey: Exactly.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): That is really useful to know. Thank you.

I have a couple more questions, if that is all right. Stephen, you mentioned the punchbag. I understand why that would be necessary, but the case studies include things such as a child saying that getting a bike made the world of difference to them. How do you find a balance? How do you get the balance right between making sure that it is helpful but not perceived as being a reward?

There is reference to some children having 11 orders. I am asking myself how on earth they have received 11 orders. Would they all be from one incident involving a raft of offences, or is there perpetual stuff going on there? It is about the notion of reducing to one order for everything, but, if somebody has 11 orders, it makes me wonder whether something is not working. I understand how it would be ridiculously difficult for parents and everybody else to keep track of that. How do they get 11 orders? What is going on in the system? What is the process, and how does that work?

Mr Martin: On the early stage diversion, that small amount of money — £500 — is linked to helping to reduce the issues and to support the child to deal with their offending behaviour. It depends on the needs of the child, but it might be used for membership of a boxing club or for the punchbag; as I said, 40% of our young people's offences are violence against the person. It is about pro-social activities, so, for example, quite a number of our young people get their construction card, a health and safety card that you need before you can work in the construction industry; forklift certificates; and gear for work or interviews. It might be gym membership, because that could be a way for a child with, perhaps, trauma or emotional issues to manage their energy. Anything that we do is linked to trying to address their offending behaviour.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): They do not perceive it as a reward.

Mr Martin: No. It is very clear. Sometimes, it is about the family. Mum can be struggling, and we have used it to pay for counselling for Mum because she needs a bit of support. We are innovative, and I give my staff a lot of latitude to use their professional judgement, which is really important.

Some of the 11 orders will have been issued because of a single incident. For example, in a care home, there could be a situation in which the police are called, and, because the police are called, the child kicks off because of their trauma, and a number of offences could be rolled into one. Sometimes, a child will not have got through the system to be referred to us in a timely way, and they could then have racked up other offences. That is often the case, Colleen, is it not?

Ms Heaney: There is a range, as Stephen has described. It can be a case of one or two offences, with multiple offences having been committed during the situation. Occasionally, there is a prolific offender, a young person who goes out and steals, but that is more unusual. It is usually a child with care experience who has multiple needs and cannot cope in a situation and who acts out in a particular way, and, unfortunately, one offence turns into five over the course of a night.

The Chairperson (Ms Bunting): I thank you very much for indulging me with questions. We went through quite a few, but I really wanted to understand some of the thought behind your report. I thank members for their patience in bearing with me as I asked them. Thank you very much for your attendance. Your evidence has been really helpful to us.

Mr Martin: Thank you.