YP had been spoken to and warned by the police in his neighbourhood for anti-social behaviour. Police concerns escalated when he started associating with known drug dealers. Prior to these incidents he had been excluded from school for an extended period due to aggressive behaviour.
The purpose of the first few sessions were not only to build rapport but to also assess his needs. We did a mental health assessment as well as a Voice of the Child exercise. Many of YP’s basic needs remained unmet; to focus on enrichment as diversion to ASB, criminal exploitation and education was not the priority; his parental supervision and living conditions were very deprived.
Voice of Child highlighted that YP wanted to be in some form of education. He wanted to speak to his mum. He wanted to play with his younger siblings. He wanted to live in a house with more than 1 bedroom. At the time he was living with his dad in a 1 bed flat.
We discovered his social worker was on long-term leave and he had not been allocated a new one. This communication with social services triggered a multi-agency approach under the coordination of a new social worker. This allowed me to start working on the main agenda with YP (the reason he was referred) while his social worker made progress with reconnecting him with his mum and siblings using legal mechanisms, address the inappropriate housing and assess dad’s capacity to look after him.
YP set a goal of getting back into mainstream education. To achieve this, he knew he needed to stay out of trouble in his neighborhood and be prepared to engage with education with a different mindset.
We then moved on to complete some informal education sessions around the risks of CE and the wider impact of ASB within communities. We used activities such as go-karting and climbing to maintain interest and to allow for practical reflection. We also did an extended session on knife crime because he was expressing glamourized views of music artists known to rap about knives and guns.
We continued to attend multi-agency meetings throughout this intervention.
• YP has moved to a bigger property and his mum is now his primary care giver. He is allowed to contact his siblings. He has reconnected with old friends who are his age and enjoys playing football and on-line gaming with them.
• “I want to get my head down so I can get a decent job”. YP is a man of few words, but it is clear how the intervention rekindled his interest in education and the need to engage with school in order to build the future he wants. In the final session YP reported feeling less stressed and in general commented that “things are much better now”.
• He started school on a reduced timetable but now is attending school full time and is thinking about what subjects to choose so he can attend college in a couple of years. He is expressing ambitions to become a trades man
• He is enjoying home life and now has a relationship with his mum and 2 younger siblings who he loves playing with.
• YP and his family continue to be supported by a social worker
We used routine outcome measures to assist the assessment. The Mind Star showed significant improvement in attitude towards education but the T1 scores of SDQ and RCADS didn’t highlight a mental health need.
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From time to time, we used activities such as climbing/bouldering to aid the conversations within the intervention; balancing the principles of youth work and informal educations worked well for YP |
During this session YP learned about the personal and social impacts of knife crime |