As part of our ‘Criminal Justice Month’, we asked the Youth Justice Board’s Programme Manager for Over-Represented Children, Adam Mooney, for his thoughts on Levelling the Playing Field’s potential to achieve lasting, positive change.
As far as I’m aware, Levelling the Playing Field is the first time that the Youth Justice Board has collaborated with sport at a strategic level. The ambition and scale of the project are extremely exciting and it aligns perfectly with our Child First’ principle of giving children the best possible opportunity to live fulfilling, crime-free lives.
The project is reaching out to 11,200 ethnically diverse children who, statistics show, are over-represented in the Criminal Justice System. This project is going to be significant in addressing that inequality by providing positive opportunities around prevention and diversion, but also for those who are already within the system.
It feels like this is a perfect time to start this project. The Alliance of Sport has made real progress in bringing key figures within sport and criminal justice around the table, the London Marathon Charitable Trust has provided funding, the closure of youth clubs has created the need and the Review of Sport in Youth and Adult Prisons by Prof. Rosie Meek has created political awareness and demand for an evidence base to justify further consideration.
My hope is that this project will be able to fulfil that demand for evidence which proves that sport works as a tool for prevention, diversion and desistance.
At the YJB, when talking about recording and presenting evidence, we often grapple with what we call the ‘prevention paradigm’. Prevention work succeeds when offending doesn’t happen, so how do you prove that it’s a direct impact of your intervention?
That’s one of the reasons why the evidence base in this arena is limited and that funding has been reduced at the ‘front end’ of the system over the last 10 years. In my opinion, that is not the direction in which we should be heading.
What we do know from the evidence is that when children are engaged in pro-social activities, they are more likely to head down the positive pathways laid out in front of them. Levelling the Playing Field increases those sorts of opportunities for children who are more at risk, which strikes me as a very promising change in direction.
If, at the end of the project’s duration, our output data shows that, for example, 90% of the 11,200 children we worked with did not go on to offend (as well as a myriad of other positive outcomes), it will provide hard evidence that sport and physical activity is the key to diverting children from criminal influences, providing benefits for each child, their communities and society in general. Then we will really be on the road to influencing future policy and practice.
Levelling the Playing Field is also closely aligned to the YJB’s ‘Child First’ ethos. Our vision is for the youth justice system that sees children as children, treats them fairly and helps them to build on their strengths so they can make a constructive contribution to society. What lies behind any offence is very often a complex web of adverse child experiences and trauma that have contributed to sending a child down a certain path. LtPF, with its emphasis on trauma-responsive mentoring, is like-minded in its approach and also prioritises health and wellbeing. The benefits for participants are many and varied.
Read more blogs:
Morgan Mitchell: How to engage autistic children in sport and physical activity
Prof. Amanda Kirby: How to support participants with neurodivergent traits
Morgan Mitchell: How does ethnicity affect youth diversion?
Morgan Mitchell: Creating psychological safety for the return to sport post-lockdown
Morgan Mitchell: 'You can't be what you can't see!' Why diversity matters